How we lost communication to entertainment
ploum.net
ploum.net
Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.
For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
Without being sucked in into doomscrolling and content consumption? Produce content? I'd guess it should be possible to play with the thing somehow...
You using TikTok earnestly would result in a feed vastly different from your kids anyway.
I think that's similar to when politicians try to "be like the people". I think "normal people", and children, prefer that their "betters" are actually examples of something better.
I have found it a lot easier to find a diversity of opinions from a more diverse group of folks there. Specifically, I have been really interested in what leftist/liberal bipoc folks think about current events, and it's very easy to get that content. And it's easy enough to flip quickly past hoteps and maga black men, who I don't usually care about hearing from. The disussions between say, black anarchists, pro-Harris DNC folks, and afropessimists have been very enlightening, personally.
Those aren't conversations I have been able to find on, say, Ig.
The main thing is that it pays a lot of attention to what you actually stop and watch, so if you let your attention wander you might end up watching folks rebuild industrial electric motors or paint warhammer minis.
Honestly, I think it's a lot less mind numbing than the last bits of broadcast TV or feature films folks have inflicted on me, regardless of folks enjoying their ability to hate on it.
TikTok is unusable for me.
An important bit of context is that I prefer to get detailed information through text, research, sometimes podcasts, but rarely ever videos. The shorts serve as one low effort way (among others) for me to surface new potentially interesting things, to follow up on to the degree I find useful or interesting.
Instagram is trash, Youtube Shorts is complete AI puke trash.
TikTok actually seems to "know" what I like seeing and clearly learns faster than the others.
A quick test just now:
- Video about Amiga 500 in the 90s in Finland
- A running gag about people having a Favourite Spoon
- A recipe for Bao Buns
- A skit about Japanese Shisa Kanko pointing and calling method
- Book reviews of someone's favourite books of 2025
- Someone tried to do floor work and found a massive shaft leading down under their house
Instagram reels:
- A "family account" skit, yech
- Ad
- A verified account reposting other's videos
- Another one of those
- Ad
- A meme account
- A meme account
- Ad
I asked someone a similar question to you a year ago and they told me something like "just spend 15 minutes with it. Aggressively swipe past things you aren't enjoying, like the the things you like. Search for something you are interested in too and like anything you like there". My feed is currently entirely basketball coaching tips for kids, cooking & recipes, stand up comedy, basic DIY, fitness/running tips, local restaurant recommendations, and sports highlights.
I'm not sure that's worth it but I'm willing to be this is not possible to achieve.
I haven't watched the news in 5 years. I started watching it again since Bondi (I live nearby), and while I'm surprised at the variation in reporting styles (political bias?) between Australian channels, my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
I've found it very helpful to watch the live briefings, Q&As, etc with politicians, but the news cycle here is so short (hourly) that a few minutes later you get to hear a "recap" by the news reporter that glosses over most of the important and interesting points (at best) or actively removes key nuance and outright changes the message delivered by the original person (at worst).
I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
Presumably this was what "journalism" was originally supposed to be.
I have found that some Youtube channels and videos (non-comprehensive examples below (I have hundreds of subscribed channels), mostly not politics, but these things inform politics since politics is making decisions about other things) can fill this gap nicely. This is not a perfect choice, since journalism integrity and standards do not apply, but I find that this can be mitigated by watching a wide variety (for example, in the field of economics, I regularly watch creators who espouse everything from very free-market capitalism all the way to full on communism). There are likely other forms of new media that operate at this level of depth, but I haven't found htem.
https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWUaS5a50DI
https://www.youtube.com/@HowMoneyWorks
https://www.youtube.com/@DiamondNestEgg
https://www.youtube.com/@TLDRnews (and associated channels)
https://www.youtube.com/@BennJordan (recent good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo)
Is this true for Australian politics? This is exactly what I'm looking for. Currently all my searching for recent events just results in summarised/paraphrased news reports with some footage, or shorts and clickbait.
Where possible you want everyone to be well informed on the way in, at least about the current situation and the obvious proposals. This gives people time to digest the information and maybe even suggest their own proposals.
Then there's two types of meetings.
* Leadership communication meetings (quick review to make sure everyone understands how important the data they already knew about is / cement context).
* Brainstorming meetings (figure out a plan / pathfinding)
This is the key. I think they (entertainers cosplaying as journalists) do it on purpose. For example, from time to time I do attempt to watch some "news" on TV with my partner.
A typical interaction may be: - TV - "..the president vetoed a bill to lower taxes...here is what this politician thinks: 'I think he only cares to gain support of the extremists he secretly supports', and here is what another politician thinks 'it was a bad bill'" - me to my partner - "did I miss it? have they said what the bill was about? What were the exact things that were questionable?" - her - "nope" - TV - "... The president says he will be submitting a similar bill minus the parts he disagreed with, and now a house burned down in..." - me - "WTF was that?"
I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
Exactly my impression. I tell people there is no real news in the United States, only gossip style reporting of information one can do nothing about and has nothing to do with them. If the reporting it political, it's in 4th grade language and a second grade mentality. News in the United States is talking to children.
We are not given any factual and material information on business activities in the nation, which is what the nation is actually doing. Who (as in companies) are gaining, are losing, and how is this economic conflict manifesting for their consumers and employees? None of that reporting is performed, the population is too shallow minded to even understand the discussion. Where are the local economics news that graduates to county, state and region with actionable numbers and not pointless no-ground reporting like "the stock market has trading volume of x trillions" <- useless information.
We get sports and entertainment news, which is not news, not really, not at all.
For example, we have plenty of "journalism" that reports exactly what some entity says. That just makes them a PR channel. If they added context that politician's or company's message's content's meaning would turn on its head and would be exposed as a lie.
Similarly, a lot of news would greatly benefit from larger context that just is not there, and that the vast majority of "consumers" of the news are simply not aware of, through no fault of their own.
"Just report what you see" IMHO is part of the problem, not the solution. It's trying to "solve" the reporting problem by removing most of the role of journalists because they are seen as unreliable, for good reasons, but I don't think that works at all. It is similar to trying to solve all problems by adding ever more rules for everything, to remove the uncertainty and unreliability of individual decisions.
This is just like at work, where the capital owners and bosses would love to replace all those pesky annoying opinionated humans with something more controllable and predictable. If the intelligence can be moved from the people into the process, the latter become replaceable and much cheaper, and the company gets much more control. But it is not just the owner class that does not like having to rely on and to deal with other humans.
I think the direction of development of the role of journalists has actually gone way too far in exactly the direction of them using less and less of their own brains, and having less influence and ability, for most messages, the very few deeper pieces notwithstanding.
Although, none of that will do anything as long as the news source owner structure is the way it is, with a few billionaires controlling most of the big news sources.
Personally, I find a good example of this is the different election broadcasts: the commercial TV broadcasters tend to have their staff take both the role of election analyst (i.e. result prediction) and commentator, whereas the ABC (one of the public broadcasters) has tended to have clear separation of roles (enough such that the election analyst who just retired has a cult following), with an election analyst who is giving detailed predictions and calls the election, political journalists providing context/analysis, polling experts covering what the polls missed/got right, and politicians from the major parties giving their opinions as well.
Intelligent people are boring. They're worried about problem-solving. Problems like on the tests back in school that used to make my head hurt, problems I'd get the red X on and have to repeat 3rd grade over because of. Unintelligent people are exciting. They're in conflict. They're fighting, or going to find a fight somewhere, and if you watch long enough they might even get into that fight right then and there (Bill O'Reilly used to do that on air, after all).
LLMs can produce a literal terabyte of slop for cheaper than a month's wage for a journalist. I'm not hopeful.
Much of it is merely factual statements conveyed by over-the-top body language and vocal intonation which paint a clear "this is bad" or "this is good" language. Often the language is biased as well, but the modern newscasters are "telling you how to feel" via the tone of voice in the same way that a friend is "telling you how to feel" when he recounts his horrible day that the office. Via body language and tone of voice he prompts you to respond sympathetically to him, and the newscaster does much the same.
Sometimes in conversation Israel or tariffs or whatever comes and I'm always like... idk? What do I, have a PHD? I know enough to know they're complex issues and the worst thing i could do is have a strong opinion
I don't have the time to become expert in global affairs, history, climate science... all the fields implicated by the big hot-button issues. The next best thing is defer to someone knowledgeable and objective (given you can find such a person), IMO.
And I realize that I'm taking the bait, but it's worth noting that the flip-side of the oversimplification of complex topics in modern news media is the affordance of notions of complexity to issues that are fairly cut-and-dry, when applying known and well-accepted standards to them. Solving housing issues in the US? Complex, though news media would have you believe that the answer is simply, "Build more." Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Simple, though biased experts spend enormous amounts of energy spinning extant circumstances that are readily accounted for in most definitions of genocide. Tariffs? Very well understood. Ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Apparently a bit more difficult than flooding the country with weapons and finger-wagging at Vladimir Putin until he stops being bad.
Note also that this isn't predicated on the existence or non-existence of social media as an influential force. It's simply a matter of whether or not the corporate and political interests that steer public discourse find it useful to complicate or simplify a news story.
So much this! Social media has also allowed people to reinforce their own opinions and spread them by connecting with others who think the same way. Back when we mainly interacted in real social communities, fringe ideas couldn't get traction because there wasn't enough reinforcement.
That's especially true for evolving emergencies like Bondi. In my opinion, you might as well wait until tomorrow, or next week, and get all of the information at once. Unless, of course, you're involved, but that's extremely rare.
I love both books, but when you read Understanding Media you will see how blatantly Postman just restated McLuhan's basic thesis and pretended to tweak it to make it his own ("the medium is the metaphor" has the same meaning as "the medium is the message"). However, I found where Postman's book really excelled was in its presentation of the historical changes in literacy in the US. I knew we were a literate country once, but I didn't realize just how much we were.
And that's the story of how I made a work best friend.
Seriously though, if you haven't read amusing ourselves to death you need to.
Climate Town had a video a little while ago, "Joe Rogan Doesn't Understand Graphs", where Rogan talks about a Washington Post article and says things about it that are the exact opposite of what is written in the article:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1bMJekCiBw
* https://www.climatetownproductions.com/youtube/rogan
> I’m generally suspicious of people who tell me I shouldn’t listen directly to the words of people they dislike.
You mean like Mel Gibson talking about climate change, without any pushback or being unchallenged by Rogan?
They're more concerned in being the first than being accurate.
Unless the event is something definitive like "celebrity died", it's much better to just check what happened a few days later when there are some actual facts and not just rushed speculation masquerading as facts.
I'd pay a modest subscription for a service that would give me the news, but just delayed by 24-72 hours, after all the "BREAKING NEWS" crap is just "news".
The Internet (including TikTok) will have nearly unlimited stories, told in unlimited ways.
I remember very well when just a few powerful people were allowed to decide what the public would be allowed to know and not know. They could suppress huge stories and leave the public in the dark. For example Chernobyl. They still try that today in print media and television, but have become a pathetic laughing stock now that information is free.
Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
Possible, but also quite unlikely. From the people who post "news" on TikTok, I wonder how many spent at least 30-60 minutes on verifying what they're about to post? There is an endless sea of "influencers" who want to be first with posting something, that "validate what you're about to report" doesn't even enter the arena before they've posted their snippet. And if it's retracted, count on the video just silently disappearing.
Contrast that with TV and print that at least have some sort of validation, although imperfect, with editors and what not, that review things before they're published. Now of course, US media is a really shit example of proper journalism, as they've all fallen into basically doing "content creation", but if you look at other newspapers and news channels around the world, you'll see that proper journalism is still done, and the people pushing videos on TikTok usually do "content creation" very differently from TV and paper, with very different understanding of what they're actually contributing to.
It's usually not very hard to verify information, and then you know which sources to trust better.
Highly respected and highly ranked mass media sometimes publish outright lies and made up stories, completely knowingly. Because they are in the business of manipulation. So you have to trust your gut, and verify if something smells strange. Many times it isn't even possible to verify, as for much of war reporting.
There will never be a time when there will be an absolute guarantee of anything. Not as long as there are people.
The only rational answer is that they are just entertainment to you. And to most other people.
The rational answer is that they look at the news to see if there are any stories important and relevant enough that they would care to verify them.
Mainstream TV channels have their biases but "unlimited" doesn't actually mean anything if the content you're getting served is whatever the algorithm thinks will engage you, which is usually something that already aligns with your world view, or something that doesn't but is designed to outrage. Most average folks who browse the internet aren't looking past the sensational headlines they see in their Apple or Google curated news feeds.
Imagine talking about how the "internet has unlimited stories" and then following up with "people who use TikTok are better informed".
If you're getting the information by listening to one of those jackasses in their sing-song presenter voices... you're not getting information at all. You're functionally illiterate and hyponotized by someone who learned to exploit Youtube-style algorithms.
So your argument is centrally controlled and edited distribution of news information is superior?
I was born in 82, and news has been largely rubbish in almost all forms. Heavily biased by the editors/owners, things missing, weird focuses. The 1940s was filled with propaganda and newspapers were owned by a few moguls or by fascist governments.
At least with the uncensored internet it's possible to educate yourself. There is plenty of amazing journalism if you look around. Including on Tik Tok!
The fact that people believe in journalistic integrity shows how successful they are at brainwashing the public.
But… and I appreciate you did say "at a minimum"…
Radio is absolutely something you can have on in the background, vibrating your eardrums without engaging your attention.
Intentionality may be impossible in TikTok for all I know, but it isn't enough to just do radio, and I think also not print.
Rock music? Rap? Video games??
In East Asia I see TikTok as pretty healthy, encouraging kids and even older people to be more active in public spaces, doing harmless dances or imitating other trends. It's actually pretty refreshing. Why you hatin?
Or is the West just salty that Facebook/YouTube/Instagram etc fell off as sterile in comparison?
Now the consensus seems to be that it's a Chinese mind-control tool and it represents everything the misanthropes here hate about modern culture, the web and the generations that participate in it.
It seems to be exactly the same generational impulse as our parents railing against the "boob tube" and "devil music" or (to quote RMS) "(c)rap music." Although they weren't entirely wrong they weren't nearly as correct as they insisted they were. I suspect the same is true about the current moral panic around social media, and TikTok in general. Yes there are legitimate concerns, but it isn't the ontological evil people make it out to be either. It isn't actually controlling people's minds. It isn't actually more addictive than heroin.
And to answer NiloCK without another comment, what's worse will be "TikTok but everything is AI generated by the platform itself." Say what you will about TikTok, at least a lot of it is still human expression.
If you drop the word "Chinese" and "misanthrope" I'm in board with your description.
So no worse than FB etc. then, even Reddit and HN where certain views are promoted and others buried.
There are advantages to the disjointed, small, grassroots, often histrionic, news of today. We get a lot more perspectives in our news. We get so many it’s overwhelming (and we sadly need to jump into our corners to feel safe).
Anyone can start a Substack now and the market can decide if they’re a journalist. In my town there are several more trusted and prominent than the local broadcast news. Some specialize in a topic like housing. Some focus on govt going’s on. And of course there are local nutjobs (or I think they are, others disagree?
It’s messy and not nearly summarized, but in some ways it’s better and more detailed than bland evening news.
https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-the-cable-news-rati...
The real action in news media is in flagship newspapers (WSJ, NY Times), podcasts, substacks..
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.
FWIW the lyrics are written by (and spoken word performed by) guest artist Nicole Blackman (according to https://www.discogs.com/release/73597-KMFDM-Xtort )
Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.
Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.
Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!
"opiate of the masses... heart of the heartless world"
Marx was despairing at the heartlessness of the condition of working class people in industrial slums, people one generation or less removed from the flight from rural landless dispossession and starvation into the polluted cities and factories and tiny apartments in slums in search of survival. He saw religion as one tool people used to salve the pain, to reduce the suffering.
Far more complicated than "religion bad, we should ban it, mmkay"
There's probably an analogy here around the "attention economy" and "social media."
Look for root causes. If you turn everything and everyone into a commodity -- "market yourself!" -- don't be surprised when the consumptive model takes over all consciousness.
The commodity form is the [post|hyper]modern religion.
So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”
2. For every social media account you have: close it.
3. Profit
I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.
On every day of the week ending in 'y'. People did know that before social media I'm pretty sure, and they still do.
You want to know whether something is true? Stop taking peoples word, demand capital 'P' Proof, and infer exclusively based on that proof.
And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)
You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".
Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun.
But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.
Sources can include people you've never met, have no reason to lie, and happened to be in an opportune position to contribute to the sort of lowercase p proofs that you need.
If we can fix social media there can be many such people. If not, there will be necessarily fewer, and they'll have to be replaced by people for whom addressing the public with new information is their job. The latter sort are high value targets for corruption. As long as they're worried about keeping that job, they have to also worry about who they upset with their information. You're necessarily going to get weaker lowercase-p proofs from such people.
That's not to say that we'll have no tools for keeping power in check, but we will have fewer, which means their abuses will be more frequent and more severe.
Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media.
If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.
Pulling out your cell phone to post your own angry rants about how your cousins were using social media is just pointless grandstanding.
My suggestion was much more modest. Put down the phone and delete your socials. Disengagement is the ultimate act of rebellion.
Rebellion is about stripping people of power. The disengagement you're describing, if not followed up by a different sort of reengagement, would merely be getting out of the power's way.
When I google search "why is the sky blue" , it spins up an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful for simple, known answers.
When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again. Google was a pioneer of search indexing, and now it seems like we don't attempt to index answers at all. They're spinning up an LLM every time because they're trying to run up the AI "adoption" metrics.
I'd love to be able to ask for simple things, like the address of the local restaurant 3 blocks away, without firing up a GPU in an AI data center.
I don't always want to "talk with" a computer. Sometimes I just want to "use" a computer. Maybe that makes me a fool. Or an old man yelling at clouds.
I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states.
Got the exact same answer.
These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.
I just asked it the same question on 2 different devices.
The question I asked was harder than why is the sky blue. I asked it "who was Edmund Fitzgerald".
One device, it gives me the ship. The other device, it gives me the person. I can copy/paste the answers here, if we want to compare.
Again, this could happen because I used "too hard" of a question. But I'm definitely getting 2 different answers.
You can of course, do this will almost every LLM. I can ask copilot 3 times and get conflicting answers each time.
Maybe for some types of questions that's beneficial. But for simple "what is X" questions, it's not as useful.
> every algorithm … every UX tweak
Actually, is the whole comment sarcasm? Or is the proposal to ban algorithms/UX changes? Or just such things if they increase sales on a product page, etc?
We can work our way up to eliminating all targeted advertising later, lets start with the stuff that's indistinguishable from malware.
If someone explicitly chose an ad-supported option (instead of paying for an ad-free version, likely with an accompanying ToS), would that count as consent?
Would a GDPR-type banner also count? Although I guess GDPR banners generally need JS to execute, so that wouldn't be allowed - I guess a GDPR-like interstitial page would be needed before accessing most websites? Or what would consent mean?
> the right to execute code on somebody’s device
1. Would that include serving text, image, and/or video JavaScript ads? 2. Would this mean that JavaScript or anything beyond text/images/videos would generally be forbidden on the web, without 'consent' (also depends on the question above about what counts as consent)?
Regardless, if we did do away with most ads, do you imagine that much of today’s internet/websites (which are ad-supported) would go away? Become paywalled? Something else?
Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
Being a precursor is not inconsistent with great filters, a great filter is why nobody else is there to be one.
Great filter is anywhere at all in the progress of life from pre-life chemistry to stable interplanetary expansion; filters behind us, for example multicellular life or having dry land so we can invent fire, are still potential great filters and they would leave no space ruins to find.
That said, my assumption is lots of little filters that add up. Eleven filters behind us each with 10% pass rates is enough to make us the peak of civilisation in this galaxy; eleven more between us and Kardashev III would make the universe seem empty.
I’d say we’ve already got measurable statistics. When half of genz isn’t dating or married, it’s signaling trouble.
https://aibm.org/commentary/gen-zs-romance-gap-why-nearly-ha...
Now, we can discuss if that’s good or bad for the planet, but it’s not great for humanity.
What has changed is expectations. The room I rented in my final year of university, and that was only 20 years ago, would (I think) no longer be legal: too poorly insulated. Very cheap though, I think it was £40 a week? Even after adjusting that for inflation since then, that was cheap. But it's (I think?) no longer possible.
Expectations for things that can be bought have gone up faster than our ability to buy them. We didn't used to all expect to be able to fly somewhere on holiday. We didn't used to all expect to have a phone — and I don't just mean a smartphone, or even a mobile phone, my first partner was a bit older than me, born in the 70s, their family didn't have a landline. All the streaming services are expensive, I grew up with 4 free-to-air channels and no internet (not even a dialup modem) let alone broadband that you need to stream video, no cable TV or satellite TV. Smart bulbs for mood lighting can quickly become expensive, I grew up in an upper middle class house and yet it had one, singular, dimming switch for the incandescent bulb it took. A microwave was a fancy accessory, not standard, when I was a kid. It all adds up.
Also, our expectations for relationships have gone up faster than humans could ever change, as our expectations follow not reality but rather perception. Sure, the perception was already off when I was young, we had unrealistic body goals in high-gloss magazines and Hollywood glamour and unrealistic romances in stories and unrealistic sex in porn, but even with that the quantity one could consume was relatively limited… and now we have the highest-rated content from our always-on social media accounts, A/B tested to be more appealing than reality, and even when it isn't AI-enhanced or photoshopped, it's still the final cut to the cutting room floor of having to deal with flawed real people.
I’d say there is better evidence to suggest the fall in birth rates is predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children, and enabling the invention of the single mother who survives on government largesse. Separating church and state appears to be contributing at least to some extent.
Single mothers, and women having their first child in their late 20’s or 30’s, appear to be maladaptive.
I'd say the evidence is inconclusive and could just as easily be explained by not telling men they needed to take on their share of the burden at home now that their women were no longer trapped at home doing unpaid, manual labor all day.
Instead, we're letting people say "gay sex includes giving a woman an orgasm instead of a pregnancy" (an actual thing I've heard a right-wing influencer say right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH6uydPCX8Q ) and encouraging men to be more selfish and anti-woman.
Also who cares about a fall in birth rates? We need a fall in birth rates. Above replacement rate is mathematically unstable in the long term.
When people complain bout "a fall in birth rates," they're a mix of capitalists who need their profits to ever increase, and white supremacists who mean WHITE people need to have more babies because society is too BROWN now.
We're about to have hella unemployment from too many people for too few jobs. We need fewer people.
You link to a youtube podcast of kids stating things as if they are facts, its just a podcast. I've never heard these things actually said anywhere. It means nothing.
Then your quote is taken out of context and a new culture war is created, well done.
Who is “telling them that”? Society by allowing them to open a checking account? Women’s suffrage? The reality is that other than the most privileged, a modern family can’t afford to function without both parents working. I assume you’re for raising the minimum wage to allow a family to run on a single income with multiple children? Or your solution is to send us back to the dark ages and remove womens rights?
> enabling the invention of the single mother who survives on government largesse.
There’s literally nobody who has kids as a single mother with the goal of raising them on welfare, that might be the single most ridiculous statement in this thread.
> Separating church and state appears to be contributing at least to some extent.
The Russian Orthodox Church is government sponsored. How’s their birth rate going?
Do they live upper middle class on this income? No. But they do live and have multiple children.
They don't buy formula obviously and they cloth diaper with used stuff from marketplace. To cover the two examples you gave
I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs. I never found it all that funny given that it was a reality for my family.
Yes, we should all aspire to have our children's mother at home during the child's developmental years rather than letting it be a string of minimum-wage strangers. If you can't manage that, oh well, it happens... but that's the ideal that we should all want. And wouldn't it be a hell of a world, where the single income could support such a family?
>I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs.
Someone above asked "who was telling them X". Well, in your case, it was 90s sitcoms. Not just your case, everyone's really. Sitcoms have been used to negatively portray what should be ideals since at least the 1970s.
No, but there's is evidence that the fall in birth rates is affected by all the content slop people spend their times consuming instead of talking to one another and fucking one another... and the ideas that slop puts into their heads are even worse...
It then stabilizes around 1980 and starts a second downward slop around 2010 - the time of smartphones and social media.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birt...
The way to change all of that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with economic and labor policy
Society decided it was OK to have the top 1% control 27% or all wealth and the top 10% control 60%, and allow companies to pay wages so low that a person working full-time cannot even get out of poverty, so 25%+ of the workers at the largest employer qualify for food benefits (and the employer even gives employees seminars how to get benefits), while the leaders/owners of those companies rake in more billions every year.
Society decided it was OK to make sure health care is expensive, incomplete, and bankrupting for any unexpected event.
Society decided it was the mothers who are responsible for all childcare and provide only minimum assistance for critical needs like prenatal care, and day-care.
You want more babies? Make just a few changes
Change requirements so corporations are required to compensate their employees merely the way the original US minimum wage was specified (including in the 1956 Republican Party Platform): So a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education. Recognize that the companies trying to exploit their workers by paying less so their full-time employees need govt benefits to feed themselves are the ones exploiting welfare, and do not have a viable business model, they have an exploitation model.
Add making healthcare sufficient and affordable for all, including children and support for daycare and the time and effort to raise children.
Change those things, and instead of a couple looking at making an already hugely insecure future even more insecure by having children, they would see an opportunity to confidently embark on building a family without feeling like one misfortune or layoff could put them all in the street.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States
[2] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1956Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Using “The invention of the single mother” is a poor way of explaining away Bad Marriages and relationships.
Also, there was a UN report which came out that showed that a major factor behind people choosing not to have children, globally, is money.
More important than money is economic security, the ability to expect a reasonable long-term access to a sound source of income.
Having to worry whether you'll be laid off next week and not be able to get new work, and have that worry be constant over a decade is a real discouragement to having children.
Having a stable situation in life is vastly underrated, and not easily measured by current net worth or income.
> Money not infertility, UN report says: Why birth rates are plummeting
> Roughly 40 percent of respondents cited economic barriers – such as the costs of raising children, job insecurity and expensive housing – as the main reason for having fewer children than they would like
> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/10/money-not-infertili...
Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior. People almost always say what they think is right not what they really feel. I suspect a lot of people don’t have kids because they are afraid of having ugly or stupid or sick children… would you say it out loud if that was the case for you? I am sure you would not and you would rationalize it as being about money somehow.
1) The surveys are designed to figure out these things
2) Even if the surveys are not, the shift y-o-y, from previous statements, providing trend data. Respondents can always choose different masking reasons for their choices. Pricing becoming a standout reason speaks volumes.,
3) If you reject both those points, you can postulate any theory you like, and there will never been current data to back it up. At this point we can assume any reason, as a matter of preference not as a matter of fact.
The jury is still out on that one... failed "business" person who was also a "reality TV star" - and now appears to be in some level of dementia - currently in charge of the single biggest military-industrial complex on the planet...
And it was. We're now even further down in that downfall, and most content is "reality TV" style now: influencers, parasocial relationships, IG, TikTok, OF, news vlogs and podcasts that are about the anchor an not the content, and so on...
Jerry Springer theatrics has infiltrated politics, and I would judge our civilization as being in a downward trend as a result.
Humans do find alien radio signals, but they keep going dark after a brief window; the narrator suspects why, because they witness fellow humans disappearing into simulations far more fun than reality could ever be.
now we need to figure out a way to survive our survival instincts in the world of abundance and safety we have created
imo we have to conquer our own biology because we are too amped up as a species to choose temperance
I am not saying it is a good thing, but there is something to be said about current distracted humans operating internal combustion engine. Then again, my dad already told me it is all going to hell, because I can't change oil...
it would be weird if the complex biosphere environment that made our ancestor struggle was also a key balancer that we can't replace
The greatest part of the rest, however, appears to be true. I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not. Low-processed food makes my digestive system measurably happier, walking lots makes me unreasonably healthier, being among trees and mountains calms me to a crazy degree.
But then we did spend like 98% of our evolutionary history since the last big speciation event as hunter-gatherers, and we gotta be as adapted to that as any critter is to their lifestyle.
At this point I kind of expect to find perversions the social patterns and structures of hunter-gatherer groups embedded in the dark patterns that make social media so insidious, much like exploiting our built-in craving for scarce energy-dense nutrition made Coca Cola etc. the economic giants they are. I just don't know enough about the social structures of the deep past to spot these things yet. There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature on that either, so I'm not sure how I'll get there, but I'd like to.
I'm lacking words to describe how I feel reading the same comment from many people online. I too felt weird seeing how much more peaceful and healthier simple bike commute made me. I remember coming home sweaty and running across angry car drivers pissed to wait for 3 seconds more than necessary in the comfort of their seat, while me doing all these efforts .. all calm, even joyful.
Same for food, it's hard to unplug from all sweet processed food, but after a month you realize your body doesn't need it. less but better food, helps sleep too..
we evolved to live in our environment and modernity has involved a lot of removing ourselves from it
In a 1000 years, social media will recommend people stop spending time outdoors and warn against the dangers of non-ultraprocessed food.
Power outages at places where young people are forced to gather will be engineered in order to facilitate breeding as their minds will be completely starved of anything else to do while their hormones rage due to the aphrodisiac aerosols pumped into the building where they remain captive.
This isn't new. We've been doing it for a long time with booze, porn, drugs, sexual excess, gambling, pointless consumerism, certain kinds of religious fervor, endless things.
But almost all of those things are self-limiting. They're either costly, dangerous, in limited supply, or physically harmful enough to our health that we shy away from them and taboos develop around them.
Addictive digital media may actually be more dangerous than those things precisely because it is cheap, always available, endless, and physically harmless. As a result it has no built-in mechanism that limits it. We can scroll and scroll and chase social media feedback loops forever until we die.
AI slop feeds are going to supercharge this even more. Instead of human creators we will have AI models that can work off immediate engagement feedback and fine tune themselves for each individual user in real time. I'm quite certain all the antisocial media companies are working on this right now. Won't be long before they start explicitly removing human creators from the loop and just generating endless customized chum with ad placement embedded into it.
Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not either for psychological/neurological reasons or because they are exhausted and stressed and unable to summon the energy. Humans do not have infinite willpower. So I've been predicting for a while that eventually we're going to heavily regulate or tax this space.
This concerns me too due to the free speech implications and the general risk of overreacting and overcorrecting. It'll be tempting for politicians to regulate or tax only the platforms they don't like, or to use the regulatory mechanism to crack down on legitimate speech by grouping it in with addictive chum. We've seen similar things with attempts to regulate porn or hate speech. But it's coming. I have little doubt. I think we'll see this when GenZ and GenA start entering politics.
It's really still shocking to me. If you went back in time and told me in, say, 2006, that our engagement-hacking would be so successful that it became an X-risk to humanity, I'm not sure I'd believe you. I never would have believed how effective this stuff could be. It's just a damn screen for god's sake! I think a lot of people are still in denial about this problem because it seems so absurd that a touch screen can addict people as well as fentanyl, but it's true. I see it around me all the time.
Edit:
My preferred way to go about reeling this back in would be to strike at the root and start taxing advertising the way we tax booze, drugs, gambling, and other vices. Advertising revenue is the trunk of this tree. The entire reason these systems are created is to keep people staring so ads can be pushed at them. Take that away and a lot of the motive to build and run these things goes away.
Another, which we're already seeing, is to age-restrict antisocial media. Young minds are particularly vulnerable to these tactics, more so than adults, and all addiction pushers try to addict people early.
Lastly, we could start campaigns to educate people. We need schools teaching classes explaining to kids how these systems addict and manipulate them and why, and public PSAs to the same effect. It needs to be treated like a health issue because it is.
Taxes, education, and age restriction is how we almost killed cigarettes in the USA, so there is precedent for these three things together working.
We also need to be a lot more precise in our language. The problem is not the Internet, phones, computers, "tech," AI, etc. The problem is engineering systems for engagement, specifically. If you are trying to design a system to keep people staring at a screen (or other interface) for as much time as possible, you are hurting people. What you're doing is in the same category as what the Sackler family did with oxycontin. Engagement engineering is a predatory destructive practice and the people who do it are predators. I think it's taken a long time for people to realize this because, again, it's just a damn screen! It's shocking that this is so effective that we need to have this societal conversation.
> Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not
This is simply a genetic selective filter that will destroy some people while others make it through, and there will need to be an overall adaptation against finding fake slop debilitatingly addictive. Like drugs, alcohol, porn, food, opiates, etc and other things some can resist and are able to abstain while some can't. I used to worry so much about these things in aggregate but I realized it's too pervasive to eliminate and impossible to change people's nature when it comes to resisting it or even worrying about it as a problem to avoid, so simply resisting better than others and having children that hopefully are able to overcome and avoid by way of finding more value in real experiences is the only successful outcome.
If one has to really really think hard about and try really really hard to overcome, then they're probably just not going to make it... and we all know for many people avoiding addictions comes easy. This chasm of reaction to stimulus means there will be divergent outcomes. It can't be any other way.
Just giving up on those who show higher likelihood for addiction is a travesty. Failure to eliminate an addiction is no reason to give up reducing its harms, both to the person themselves, family and friends, and wider society.
This seems ridiculously fatalistic and weirdly binary way of looking at things. Best I can start with is 'why?', because to a simple person like me it could be any number of ways..
We need to normalize calling it antisocial media.
Ads tie revenue directly to time spent on the screen, and that is the root of all evil.
As another poster mentioned, ad revenue is often higher than what you can reasonably get with subscriptions. That’s where taxing advertising would help.
* warning for Americans: not suitable for those offended by sarcasm
We thrive in small groups where there is high trust social networks and generally being around people with the same culture and belief system.
Your hypothesis (which seems more and more common) seems to me to be a "just so" story, but it doesn't correlate with what I've observed of real human behavior.
1) People choose to live in the same city so they have that in common
2) 7B don't all interact together, thats not the point. The point is that its random who you talk to as most social media is anonymous.
Combine this and you have low trust + low chance of having similar viewpoints/culture/beliefs.
Manage just fine does not mean everyone is happy, and in these major areas like NYC people always seem to congregate with the groups they share the most in commong with.
Looking through this lens, fighting, limiting internet usage is akin to moving to the rainforest to avoid capitalism - lone rebelling acts in the wrong direction of history, a temporary, partial victory for the few who dare this hassle.
Time is better spent to make this emerging space better, for everyone.
https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...
I find the total opposite to be true. I desperately want more engaging content to feed the gooey goblin in my brain but the overwhelming majority doesn't cut it and this was before AI.
Almost every show I see on netflix, tiktok I glance at, or reddit post is absolute unflavored mash potatoes. Content for content's sake. Feed me more content like scavengers reign and less frankenstein remakes or super hero slop.
When I hear "there's nothing good available," I assume the person is a dullard. Like where are you looking that you can't throw a rock and hit something worth watching?!
I somewhat enjoy Stranger Things but it's falling into the space where I can write the next line of dialog in my head for whole scenes. Whereas it started out poking fun at tropes like doing exposition or relationship development at moments of maximum danger it's turned into a long sequence of Obligatory Scenes that feel increasingly forced.
You're describing mainstream entertainment in general. I started noticing this with the storyboard-as-film, action-by-numbers "Raider's of the Lost Ark". (I won't even waste my time on super hero films.)
It tastes like bland mashed potatoes to me.
It isn't that good stuff doesn't exist only that a majority is derivative and uninspired. Anything that does catch a spark is milked dry.
A lot of good creations are derivations or remix of older ideas and they don’t have to be uninspired: West Side Stiry, Ulysses, so much of jazz music…
We truly might be addicted and are slowly becoming unsatisfied with the simpler, more nuanced pleasures in life.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think you need to couple "offline interaction" with this criticism. As a neurodivergent person in more than one way I appreciate being able to interact with people that face similar challenges to me and understand me. The problem is that social media is increasingly designed to not facilitate that, but content distribution.
I guess when enough people get addicted to something, it's no longer considered to be an addiction.
When I am people watching, sometimes I am reminded of the TNG episode of star trek where everyone gets addicted to a game. Non-players grow concerned until they all succumb.
The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.
Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.
By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.
AI achieves many things for these platforms:
1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)
2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)
3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers
4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections
This just isn't true. There was a time when we had a chronological feed, only containing content from friends and family, and no advertising. The business model end goal was always advertising but social media doesn't necessarily need to be for that purpose (e.g. the fediverse).
Then I can continue with my strong preference to direct my time and attention toward content generated, mostly, by my fellow humans.
I use an AI powered tool to "listen" to podcasts and remove ads from them before I listen to the podcast myself.
Obviously I’m also posting here while I wait in the car waiting to pick someone up, but I actively make an effort to unplug on a regular basis.
is it considered social media?
Whether or not is it indeed less toxic is up for debate.
It's also fun to throw caution to the wind with a "fuck it" and just let your comment fade away after having ranted at the clouds.
It seems to be obviously social media to me
The algorithm has consumed reels/shorts/tiktok/insta. Being extremely inflammatory is rewarded there.
Is BeReal not a social media because there's no algorithmic feed?
I see enough racist and misogynist comments here to know that isn't true. And that's not even considering the low-knowledge comments offered up as expertise.
I long for the days of a Slashdot where you could filter out anyone with a UID greater than 200K or so, and it'd be nothing but 20yr experts in IT dropping rugged after rugged of tremendously insightful analysis. (Granted there was also plenty of GNAA frist psot stuff.)
If you had a similar filter here it'd likely have the the opposite effect.
All this makes me thing that while the capability may be there for those who want it, openly accessible stuff will be heavily nerfed. You know, just like now.
There's nothing I can add to this.
signed, another dinosaur (with a flawless "inbox 0" track record at both work and home, for decades now)
When most of what a user can do can be done from one single UI, the low friction will win.
And since all the data must be sent to the service, and that a super intelligent AI analysis all this data, the spying that is already considered outrageous today will reach unprecedented level.
Now, associate that with the fact the last year people in charge of said systems kissed the ring of the power that be in the most disgusting way. Add what we learned about surveillance from 3 letters agency.
You get your dystopia. It's not an if now. It's a when.
We need to solve that problem now. Once we hit it, we will lose the ability to solve it.
And I'm not sure where you could go on earth to escape it.
If anything, it might make it easier to find more of the older nerdier web that wasn't made for profit.
Also, there are so many people that are already so rabidly anti-AI that I'm certain they will form their own communities outside the mainstream.
>That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform.
Easily the best post on HN so far this year 2025, thanks.
Very messy situations that we're at the moment for our communications platform but sadly it's true.
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators.
Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult.
The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.
How? I don't even think decentralized is the appropriate term. They're distributed entertainment platforms in that they're protocol based, but regarding the distribution of content there's nothing in it that decentralizes reach. The social graph of Twitter and Mastodon could in principle be identical.
Malicious actors don't need to control algorithms. States running influence campaigns on say, Youtube or Facebook don't actually control any algorithm, they adapt their content to what does well on the platform. And they could equally do this, one could argue even more effectively, on the fediverse.
Saying the Fediverse solves top down influence is like thinking that Bitcoin solves wealth inequality. The distribution of the network is completely agnostic to the centralization of the content.
Think about how platforms have algorithmic comment ranking now, where two users who open the same comment section can see different top comments. This is a corporation or state (think tiktok) directly influencing how someone sees what their community thinks.
I don't see the bitcoin comparison.
The problem isn't the decentralization, it's the choice of a goal. However, email, IRC, Matrix, etc all already exist, and are what the author wants, so I do see tbe article as a bit misguided.
I think what the author meant to say was "I thought ActivityPub was meant to be more like Matrix, but it's not, and I'm sad about that".
I think “the algorithm” gets a lot of blame for mirroring the choices that people are making for themselves. Even when you remove any semblance of an algorithm people have no problem creating their own little worlds of outrage entertainment and rage bait.
I feel terrible for the kids currently growing up with tiktok, Instagram & al., I only hope we will build the social and legal framework to safeguard the next generations from this, until they reach a certain age at least.
Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages?
Is that the gist of it?
The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you.
The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.
Comparing it to email is inappropriate, because email is addressed to you, and you get upset if email servers/clients drop emails. But newsfeeds are not addressed to you. Neither is RSS/Atom. ActivityPub, generally speaking, isn't either. How you choose to experience messages coming your way is up to you. This whole article is making the assumption that if you want something more different, e.g. Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy (Fediverse Instagram/YouTube/Reddit), it basically must also be Mastodon/Pleroma (Fediverse Twitter). Why must it?
A phone number != an email address != a WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram account != a Twitter/Facebook/Mastodon/etc. handle != a specific handle on a specific Discord/Slack/IRC service != "I go to the Lamb and Flag in Punterby on Wednesdays, maybe see me there"
It's irrelevant whether a low level protocol or its clients deliver everything or not. What matters is human A reaching human B. If human B wants to be reached, they will tell people in advance what their communication preferences are. And they will recognise that not all communication methods are fungible nor want to be or can be made to be. You can't expect ActivityPub to have the same behaviour as SMTP any more than you could IRC.
I'm curious if this message is new to many here?
What makes it feel "dramatic"? I get the impression people say something is "dramatic" when it doesn't really land or connect? Because when something punches me in the gut, I don't say "that was dramatic", I say "that was compelling".
I'm over 40, and these kinds of concerns (technology serving people's deeper needs rather than serving them up fleeting entertainment) has been on my radar for 15+ years. Back then, I was expecting to go into public administration, policy analysis, or "technology for good" to use what might be a naive phrase.
https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway; but it shows that doing decentralised software is hard, because each actor can just do whatever they want.
The "account" then is just the data on your PDS with as many views into it as someone wants to develop. If I'm browsing (viewing) an account (subset of data) through a platform or app devoted to one type of content (data), I only want to see that kind of content in the main timeline. I can always pull out something like ATExplore or PDSls if I want to see everything.
The complaint only makes sense for a protocol that expects you to make a new account for a new platform and has limited portability. It doesn't make sense when an "account" is just a view into data, no more morally compromised than an SQL query. I'm skeptical the movement to revive the dead half of ActivityPub that could enable similar functionality will go anywhere, but I am rooting for the folks behind it.
760 000 active users [1] beg to differ
edit: the graph is not great, it seems to have plateaued, but also not decreasing. Good for a decentralized protocol.
Me and all the (real human) people I follow on Mastodon disagree. Many well known people are on Mastodon. A lot of folks I used to follow on RSS are on Mastodon. For me, Mastodon is what killed RSS.[1]
[1] RSS was well and alive long after Google Reader shut down.
A healthy user-empowered ecosystem naturally has some fragmentation; that's a sign it's working as it should to accommodate different tastes and visions. You can't use the same metrics for judging monolothic systems driven by a central authority as decentralized ones.
I share many of the author's opinions on communication vs entertainment, but the framing around an intentionally open and flexible system like ActivityPub leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Only someone who willfully forgets how terrible taxis are could say that.
Taxis were great, for both the consumer and Taxi driver.
My experience pre-Uber was that cabs were never there when you need them, the cars were smelly and in bad shape, the rides were expensive, seatbelts were usually broken, and drivers were not particularly motivated to be civil, never mind kind.
I personally don't drink bottled water on principle, but in theory it's nice to know it's there if I'm suffering.
Are your local cabs just amazing? I'm open to it, but again... floored. This very well could be a regional difference.
Edit: I cannot believe that I forgot to mention that the entire taxi medallion system found in most cities was not only deeply corrupt and usually intimately connected with organized crime... but the ownership structure was such that they enabled some of the worst legal wage slavery rackets in the western world. You've had these deeply shady owners with dozens of medallions and fleets of easily replaced, mostly immigrant drivers who all seemed to be prepared to drive for decades before someday hopefully being able to buy their own car and then drive it until they die.
I dunno, man. Convince me I'm mistaken.
All the negatives you described about the old structure still exist, it's just Uber skimming of the top now.
Just speaking from my own experience here, it's really difficult to make a compelling case that from the customer's perspective it's just objectively nicer to take an Uber.
It's cheaper, cleaner, they will find you on quiet side streets, and yes, the evil water bottles are there if you want them.
I just wish that there was a more societally beneficial third option, since VR telepresence hasn't taken off outside of the furry raver community.
In general, taxi business is very tough and tend to became worse over time due to the systems in play.
Old taxi services quality varied widely, i.e. in some areas they went into shit already while in some they were still great.
Living in a big city with pretty lax taxi regulations I experienced whole range with some providers being top quality.
Uber injected billions into the market attracting a whole lot of new people to start doing taxi gigs, which made quality much better for some regions where regular taxi was already bad, but overall, the taxi business model was not changed much if at all.
When the free money dried out, and it became obvious that uber will not be able to transition into self-driving taxi service, the quality of their service starts going to shit everywhere.
In my city, local taxies developed their own apps which are not much worse than uber, some continue to provide old style service, and uber became the provider with the lowest quality.
In my opinion, Uber business model is based on the fact that “gig workers” cannot calculate the proper amortization cost of the vehicle, so when the time goes by, companies who do know how to calculate the proper costs provide better service.
Getting in anything else is variable, from good to being completely ripped off paying three times more and being driven all over the city to rack up miles. There are even services that make the signs on the cars look like Taxi Stockholm - so you get in the wrong car.
Ride sharing means that I can get in anything and at least get home in one of the shortest routes or not pay over what I should. Still prefer Taxi Stockholm.
In other cities ridesharing equalizes the experience.
Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
That's not communication being lost, it's media.
The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.
Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.
But especially if you allow audio/video then your moderation costs can get very high if you're aiming for more "broadcast" and less "community."
Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill.
There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.
For instance if it is photography technique or sports talk or Arduino programming almost all problematic content is "off-topic" and easy to delete without splitting hairs or offending libertarian sentiments.
Similarly "no explicit images" is an easy line to defend, but anything past that like "no CSAM" is excruciatingly difficult.
For a general purpose platform where people can post what they want, particularly if there is a libertarian ethos where people cry about "censorship", moderation is a bitch.
My personal pet peeve is that on any platform that has DMs I get a lot of messages, particularly when starting a new account, for things that are transparently scams and if I was starting one today my feeling of responsibility leads me to the conclusion that I would not support DMs.
Every social network experiences convergent evolutionary pressure driving it to become social media instead.
It feels more boring, for sure, but it is vastly more satisfyingly "human", if I can describe it that way.
Yes, I'm over 50.
Ah the Gemini protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
It's a depressing thought, but I bet we will see younger people in our lifetime that just get news exclusively from LLMs
Why should we believe that "being entertained" is a valuable thing? I suppose it serves an evolutionary purpose as "steering focus", e.g. noticing the unusual/novel/scary/etc. But, it's not the end goal. And overloaded attention mechanisms sounds like an obvious misfeature.
Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.
Telecom is very very broken.
This is strong and non-obvious claim; it warrants explanation, evidence, debate.
Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.
On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.
I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
It could be. Once Facebook had everyone on board they could have pivoted to a model where people pay directly. It's easy to forget how incredibly useful it was in the early years. It's not enough for a business that needs to endlessly grow but businesses don't NEED to do that - especially tech companies where costs can be incredibly low once the initial website is built.
Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are
- from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else
- incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value
In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough.
(e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)
Start by banning all gambling and drug commercials. That's like 20% of all commercials right there. This is already normal in other countries.
Then ban all billboards. People hate them already.
Then the big one, ban targeted advertising. With personalized ads gone, all of the incentives that make data collection profitable are gone.
Of course there will still be bad actors that want data mining to continue. But right now you can't even read 95% of websites because they have popups that make you agree to data mining just to get in. I'll be searching for like, a recipe and they want my name, device IP, browser fingerprint, and anything else they can pinch.
I'm searching for a nice spinach salad recipe. I go to google
First it fires up an LLM, which will run a GPU in an AI data center that they probably cleared a forest to build.
I just made nvdia stronger. I just helped pump their AI "adoption" numbers. And I helped train an AI that will help layoff me and my friends.
As always I run the search again with "-noai" at the end. Now I'm searching twice for no reason. The results were better, and faster 10 years ago.
It gives me results and I click the first link. A video that I can't pause starts auto playing. This recipe isn't that good so I go back and find another. I need to click the back button 4 times.
I try another link. And get another pop up. I opt into data mining this time because uBo is having trouble with the full page transparent overlays. Now they have my data to sell to 3rd party intermediaries that will sell them to companies like palantir and cambridge analytica. Every search builds a little more of my "shadow profile".
Maybe I should have just gone to the library and taken a picture. All I wanted was a salad recipe and I've now helped train the system that made brexit possible. I've helped nvdia. I've helped the very AI datacenters that I hate. I've helped the data miners.
The experience of using a computer in 2025 is exhausting. Particularly search engines. They used to work so good. They used to be so fast.
Also you seem to be responding to the original post or just the first paragraph of this post. He understands the differences and the way he sees the differences is the whole post.
I get what is being said, but i disagree with the framing. The "brainwashing" happened in two stages, and the first stage is perfectly logical.
Most people don't want just 1 identity, and they want separate spaces for being different.
If you're already OK with having two accounts on BBS, what is 1 or 2 accounts more for thefacebook.com?
Google when you make a chargeback or your youtube channel has the song of a bird
The other platform also have similar weird cases.
I don't want to be instabanned from ALL the internet just because one site decides I did something wrong for real or imaginary reasons.
For common men “religion,” whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, “All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.”
I myself can compare this with the cultural state of Soviet Union. It was a very atheistic country on the surface; yet the art, the cultural scene, the newspapers, the cinema; the school education; the public forums (they existed in the form of letters to newspapers); everything was imbued with that idea that there are serious things, not everything is vanity. It wasn't dull or dark; it was very reviving, in fact, because it gave you the foundation, something firm to stand upon. There were fantastically funny comedies (I wish I could find modern comedies like that) but there was also seriousness. I still remember some journal pieces of that time that, I admit, formed me as a person. An essay about a relatively minor crime, for example: two women were bitten by guard dogs. Yet somehow it rose to your place in life; your approach to what life is; you and your responsibility for how you live. And these themes were everywhere. Until 1991.
When that happens, they slide into in-group/out-group thinking, defensiveness, and "spiritual one-upmanship" which makes everything more tense and brittle.
That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
At some point I realized those people were just like that.
I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.
We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
Links to various editions: https://www.biblio.com/the-medium-is-the-massage-by-marshall...
Also of interest, notes about the observer being the observed in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things — https://www.biblio.com/9780060916091 — and The First and Last Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom
Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?
Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.
Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?
An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
And when I do pay attention to it, I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through the 180 emails that I've been cc'd on. It's literally not worth my time or dilution of my attention. When I have attempted to get on top of this by doing all the curation and rule-authoring that productivity mavens shout about, it works for a little while but entropy sets in.
I'm just not into scripting my own life and maximizing my productivity, and my job does not pivot on prompt email responses. So my email is a garbage dump with tire fires in it, and I know that, and I get on with the things I know are actually important.
I'm not recommending this! It's just the compromise that I have settled in to. But if you wonder "why would anyone," this is it.
Also mind you, this is not about productivity. If you don't want to act on something, you delete it.
shermantanktop and you, forbiddenvoid, seem to refuse organizing TODOs, or perhaps even the concept that external events be allowed to generate TODOs for you ("my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to"). I closely know this -- i.e., "garbage dump with tire fires in it" -- because that's precisely what my SO's mailbox looks like. Whereas I've maintained a perfect inbox 0 for several decades, both at work and privately.
This is an unbridgeable psychological divide between two attitudes toward, or even two definitions of, tasks and obligations. People who can naturally implement inbox 0 never lose track of a task (not just in email, but in any other medium either), and get indignated when they receive reminders. They're excellent schedulers, and orderly, but also frequently obsessive-compulsive, neurotic. People who can't instinctively do inbox 0 cannot be taught or forced to do it, they tend to need repeated reminders, and may still forget tasks. At the same time, they have different virtues; they tend to shine with ill-defined problems and unexpected events.
Neither group is at fault; the difference has biological roots, in the nervous system. Our brains physically differ.
If I spend all my time on other people’s demands, it will all be urgent, but not enough of it will be important.
I always order reviewing the work of others ahead of working on my own code. This works wonders for the team. But admittedly, if the review workload is not distributed well, then my approach produces an annoying imbalance for me, and over the longer term, it leads to burnout.
Put differently, if I enable / assist / mentor others, that produces value comparable to my own personal output, for the company (or that's at least how I understand things). However, the emotional value of each, to me, is comparable only up to a certain extent -- namely, as long as I get to write enough code myself. The proportion must be right.
I rely on management / the team to (self-)organize the review workload, and then I prefer to help others first, and work on my own stuff second. I draw much more satisfaction from working on my own code, but I feel the importance of supporting others, so I prioritize the latter. This particular prioritization too rewards me emotionally, but only up to a certain point. I can say "no", but, in my view, if I have to say "no" frequently, to requests for assistance, then the workload is ill-distributed, and that responsibility is not mine. (I explicitly don't want to be promoted to a level where I become responsible for assigning tasks to people.)
I got feedback that my contributions weren’t tangible and visible enough. I switched gears back to my previous mode (more proactive work) and all is well again.
Different work cultures treat this differently. At another company my enabling activities would have been valued more. But I do think being the glue in a group is usually undervalued.
The threaded nature of email both helps and hurts. If it’s from a chatty sender with a chatty reply all conversation, I can delete it all, except if my boss replies, I should probably look at that.
I should also say that I work at a large company where people are auto-included with varying levels of intention. If I never sent an email, I would still get hundreds per day. Coworkers do zero inbox, so it can be done. I just don’t try anymore. Slack is where the actually urgent stuff is anymore.
This time it is different, right? The first George Mills was correct in believing that, but we don't live in his times.
Big tech social media is pushing you a stream of entertainment and pushing away from social interactions.
> Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights
There are valid complaints about Uber, but most people consider it a materially better service than taxis most of the time. They vote that way with their wallets, long after VC subsidies ended, and often even when it costs _more_ than a taxi.
That book was written in 1985, but the core observations are also applicable to modern cellphones (which have become, for the majority of users, entertainment devices).
Postman then talks about how our communication systems have degraded as a result of entertainment being the strength of our current modes.
Fantastic read.
Many people drive-during which appears to have a similarly dangerous outcome.
the details wrt social media etc were unknown, but the path we were taking was quite clear.
There is a truth to consumption over communication, but that is in the destruction of third spaces and the increasing difficulty in making friends. The fediverse is a force against that in my view, even if it has some of the creature comforts of regular social media.
This isn't true. You can still meet in person or make a phone call.
As for news media... They tend to be at the beck and call of whoever owns them. Most of them use the same press agencies but promote political binaries to the exclusion of other viewpoints.
And so my Signal is solid 40% memes. Memes that someone carefully selected and sent me but still pure entertainment. No evil monopoly necessary to make it so.
There are a lot of serious conversations we need to have as a society right now. And collectively, all we can do is make jokes.
Real progress requires that hard work of crafting and spreading a vision, something to point at that helps people express what they struggle to express themselves. It also then needs that protected intimacy of long conversations between individuals to digest it.
The architecture of social media centered around short-form public communication is not appropriate for this.
This of course applies to both constructive and destructive movements, but it’s the only way to get big real things done. I suppose that’s why we have this emergent class of powerful independent (podcast) intellectuals after a long time of the concept not being a thing. Again, for better or worse, plenty of both.
Is the conversation we're having now not both serious and on social media?
I think if the great minds of old had access to our modern internet, they would have no trouble communicating their ideas. It's not like all social media is short form. You can type a whole book into the comment box here if you want.
and
>When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago,
I am confused.
Lost me on that one. Communication networks provide significant value and can be quite profitable. That's a whole industry.
Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up.
I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.
Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front.
For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)
But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).
Also reminds me of the Dark Forrest Yancy Strickler stuff.
This has been my biggest beef with Facebook. I have an FB account, but never use it, anymore. By walking away from it, there are a number of folks with whom I can no longer communicate.
In some cases, that’s fine, but in a couple, I sincerely miss them.
I like the idea behind the fediverse, but find it too “fiddly” to use. That’s often an issue with things designed by engineers, for engineers.
There’s long been discussion of “One ID to Rule Them All,” but that brings in the inevitable (and completely valid) point of who arbitrates/controls the infrastructure for that ID (“and in the Darkness, Binds Them”).
The thing is, folks really want convenience. If it’s not provided as a benevolent resource, an opening is made available to less benevolent people. It’s going to happen, and all the hand-wringing in the world can’t stop human nature.
I feel that public discourse is particularly vulnerable to the medium. Who controls the medium, controls the discourse, and, as we’ve already seen, that can have serious consequences in the real world.
Not a new conundrum. Social Media has simply sprinkled Miracle Gro onto the problem.
I’m not sure there’s any real solution. I am thinking that today’s newer generation (“Alpha”?) is developing a “thick skin,” and maybe, is becoming resistant to people that manipulate communication. I’m fairly despondent about my generation. We seem to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the shysters.
But still almost nobody uses it. And now worst of all, people are saying it doesn't "count" as real federation.
It seems like we're letting perfect be the enemy of good. But what do I know
I just don't understand why do you need to create a new incompatible protocol when ActivityPub exists - unless enshittification is in the roadmap. Even less I understand why prefer it over e.g. Mastodon from the user's perspective
But this got me thinking about what I think a "message" really is. Maybe there's a Dunbar's number kind of thing here because I feel like there's some sort of limit on how many people I can send textual content to before it stops being a "message" and becomes more like an "announcement". Like I get emails, and some of those are messages because they come from individuals and are sent to me and perhaps a small set of other individuals. But some emails are more like announcements (or even "content"), and such quasi-messages have existed since before email went mainsteam (like holiday newsletters that people sent out with xmas cards).
It's true that many social media platforms have a messaging system that exists in parallel ("direct messages"), but that always seemed kind of separate from the core essence of the platform.
The closest you get to real "messages" in social networks is comments, but in my experience the degree to which those constitute "messages" or "communication" varies a lot from platform to platform and also from user to user. These days a large proportion of comments are just slightly more specific "reactions" like "That's so great!" or "Wow" or "Thanks for posting this". I don't often see genuine discussion happening in comments (although HN, if you consider it a social media site, is an exception to this).
There has been an evolution in this regard, but even back in the day I think it wasn't what I'd call "messaging". The earliest platform I can remember using that (in retrospect) I could call a social network was LiveJournal. But LJ was a blogging platform. You didn't post "messages" to other people, you posted, well, posts, and maybe people would comment on them or maybe they wouldn't. I would never have said that I dreamed of LJ becoming "email 2.0". And I'd say modern microblogging-type platforms (like Twitter) seem even more removed from email or "messaging".
I also don't see decentralization as really connected to this. To me the main advantage of decentralization is to eliminate single points of failure and guard against various sorts of rugpulls (like what eventually happened to LJ). But whether a platform fosters communication, messages, interaction, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much independent of whether it's decentralized.
This isn't to say that I disagree that something's been lost in internet communication over the years. But to me that missing thing seems mostly to be a combination of attention and authenticity.
We've lost attention in the sense that now that people do everything with their phones, they consume and create content more diffusely, as opposed to having a division between "I'm sitting at my computer reading or writing" and "I'm doing something else". The small screens and balky input mechanisms of phones make this problem even worse for writing than it is for reading.
And we've lost authenticity in the sense that so many platforms have become contaminated with stuff that is in no sense communication from any human, not even one-way communication. Instead it's junk generated by corporations to sell products (perhaps with some intermediate steps of harvesting data, etc.). This has become much, much worse in the last few years with the rise of AI slop. It's harder and harder to find stuff on the web that actually represents the work of a human being expressing themselves in a personal way.
So yeah, we've lost something, but I wouldn't say we lost communication to entertainment. It's more like we lost the boundaries of the units of our communication so that we find ourselves in a constant blur of content, rather than a sequence of discrete units each of which we process and ponder independently.