44 ms·

Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

305 points by kaboro 4y ago

andsoitis 4y ago
That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. That is also why you don't rely solely on your own preferences and behaviors for deciding what product features to build. Also interesting: 1. The Pre-Internet ‘People Magazine’ Era 2. Content from ‘your friends’ kills People Magazine 3. Kardashians/Professional ‘friends’ kill real friends 4. Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians 5. Next is pure-AI content which beats ‘algorithmic everyone’
- swyx 4y ago
  "the replacement of humans with machines will continue until morale improves"
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    My AI-generated content is being virtually consumed and clicked on by thousands of AI readers. No actual people in the loop. Happiness increases. I also have an AI that filters out AI generated content so I only see things sourced directly from people I know to be people. Granted, Cortana sometimes slips and gets it wrong and lets through something that obviously came from an AI... Hmm... I wonder how that happened. Happiness decreases.
- jrm4 4y ago
  At the risk of being overly optimistic: Number 4 is an interesting inflection point that could potentially (hopefully) sow the seeds of it's own destruction (or at least radical transformation?) Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much more "real person sharing real thing." Hence why I think 4 to 5 is very far from a sure bet. I'm not sure even what Pure AI could even meaningfully signify here.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    If content-generation AI is given sufficient resources and training input, I think 4>5 is pretty much guaranteed. The recommendation systems that power "algorithmic everyone" are not optimizing for real human interaction, or real people sharing real things; they're optimizing for the absolute most engaging content that they can find. This is Kardashian-killing because no one person or brand -- not even Kim -- can create the most engaging content in the world on every single post; and even if they could, they can't do it at a rate to fill an entire feed. Sufficiently good recommendation systems kill the Kardashians because they can crawl through an ocean of user-generated content and find the winners. If you combine a sufficiently good content-generation AI with the data you glean from the world's best recommendation system, you can just create the most engaging possible content, without even knowing what that would be.
  - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    > Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much more "real person sharing real thing." I believe we are well into number 4 and let me tell you, neither the "person" or the "thing" feels "real". Everything is so contrived, scripted, architected, and manufactured that the entirety of social media feels like The Truman Show at this point.
    - jrm4 4y ago
      So, my take is the following: I still believe that it's all getting "more human," and that this isn't necessarily mutually exclusive of "contrived, scripted" etc. The difference is "Kardashianism" is filtered through big media selling ads, vs. e.g. "TikTok" -- at the point of creation -- is filtered through nothing but the sensibilities of the creator and mostly stays what it was at the point of creation. Ergo, much more human.
  - telchior 4y ago
    I don't think that "Algorithmic Everyone", the one you're phrasing as "real human interaction" is really either everyone or real humans. Instead, it's turning a handful of Kardashians into a million Kardashians. The number of performers, and niches, vastly grows but it's still all performance. I think that's one reason that a lot of kids love TikTok but adults generally can't stand it. Kids are looking for sources that show them how to act. TikTok is basically a giant tips channel. Here's how to be silly, here's how to dance, here's how to be a goth... It's like an enormous highschool, but if the highschool were completely made up of amateur actors trying to get the most attention.
- trebbble 4y ago
  I'm so glad the gap between "we can keep very-long-term records" and "AI now dominates content creation" is going to be large enough, even for very recent things like video games, that I'll have enough excellent "content" to last multiple lifetimes without ever having to pay attention to the AI stuff.
mjamesaustin 4y ago
Does an addict "like" the thing they are addicted to? Or have the chemical responses in their brain been manipulated to the advantage of the person selling the addiction? Recommendation media is the perfection of a system that uses our dopamine response to control the behavior of those viewing it. At some point, I think we can agree that this isn't good for those consuming the content, especially as research shows that increased consumption decreases feelings of happiness and increases loneliness.
- jkkramer 4y ago
  A rule of thumb I sometimes use to assess products, including ones I've built: Looking back at the last year, are you (or your users) happy with the time spent using the product? Do you/they regret it? Juicing short-term engagement can be effective for startups, but it isn't everything, and doesn't necessarily lead to lasting value.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  There's a middle period in addiction where you still get novel enjoyment from the thing you're doing, but finally realize it's bad for you. It seems to be around that time when people choose a path - either quitting that thing or leaning into it, consequences be damned. So yes they still like it, but the ratio between enjoyment and suffering starts to invert such that it's beyond the point of diminishing returns. Beyond that point you are mentally or physically dependent, and it starts to become simply avoiding the withdrawls. The addictive behavior becomes the new normal even if it's totally destructive. This is why addiction is so hard Note here: most people are thinking about intoxicants when reading the above, but it's equally true for anything in unhealthy amounts (food, games, running, collecting stamps etc...)
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Addiction becomes more problematic when 'everyone is doing it', as you say with food/games, these are things everywhere in society and are hard to get away from. I'd say it's just as difficult to get away from social media since there is no general stigma that it is bad.
upupandup 4y ago
im afraid this short attention optimized dopamine manipulation system is going to be deterimental for our collective mental and cognitive capacity, especially with covid. in particular im fearful of the impact on young developing minds, this is literally setting them up for failure or maybe this is the end goal?
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  I am on a crusade to regulate my wife's instagram usage and will pretty much ban social media for my children (or at-least heavily regulate it). My wife agrees that she is much happier on the aggregate when she uses instagram less. Having worked in industries close to social media, the people here have no qualms about doing anything possible to increase revenue, whats worse is how smart some of the people are.
  - arwineap 4y ago
    > whats worse is how smart some of the people are Smart people can use instagram, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
    - strikelaserclaw 4y ago
      i meant more like those who are doing whatever to increase revenue for their companies not actual users themselves.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      That sentence referred to the people working at Instagram, not the people using Instagram. The poster meant that it is sad that smart people spend so much time and energy trying to get people addicted to these things.
- tboyd47 4y ago
  It already has. The ultimate expression of this dopamine mill is on-demand porn, and that's already run its course addicting practically the entire population and giving them sexual dysfunction. Social media is like "porn lite."
outsidetheparty 4y ago
“the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit.” I think what it actually revealed is that you can sometimes force people to accept something other than their stated preference, if you do it gradually enough and leave them no choice in the matter.
benjaminwootton 4y ago
There is something about the TikTok style swiping videos which just hits differently. I am far from the demographic for TikTok, but find it super addictive so just keep it off my phone. I barely use Instagram, but having checked in a few times recently I find myself mindlessly swiping their “Reels” for hours before pulling myself away from it. YouTube is my goto timewaste, but now when I pick it up on mobile I find myself in their “Shorts” feature which is the same kinda thing. Just that cycle of short videos in rapid fire…. humour, interesting fact, attractive woman, aspirational products, beautiful scenery, political argument then back around the cycle again is just like digital crack. Just say no!
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  same here with the youtube/tik tok shorts, a barrage of video diarrhea to make my brain light up.
  - benjaminwootton 4y ago
    You can almost feel it grabbing your brain, and it takes real will to stop scrolling and get up. These products are really powerful.
    - dopeboy 4y ago
      I can feel the "mush" sensation after watching TikTok too much. It's really a whole new level.
- mike10921 4y ago
  YouTube is my time waster as well (besides when I actually watch technical info). YouTube Shorts are decent but I must keep the volume off because for some reason creators think they must add the most annoying music to any video clip they upload. Similar to the way you describe TikTok I feel like I need a cold shower after endlessly scrolling those videos.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
ape4 4y ago
We hate it but we also wish we'd invented it.
sytse 4y ago
Great article. The author mentions: "Machine learning models can now create text and images for zero marginal cost". Another step was just taken in this direction with TikTok launching an 'AI greenscreen' based on text prompts https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/15/tiktok-in-app-text-to-image-ai-generator/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/15/tiktok-in-app-text-to-imag...
photochemsyn 4y ago
You have to dig through this entire article to get to the punchline, but here it is: > "These AI challenges, I would add, apply to monetization as well: one of the outcomes of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes is that advertising needs to shift from a deterministic model to a probabilistic one; the companies with the most data and the greatest amount of computing resources are going to make that shift more quickly and effectively, and I expect Meta to be top of the list. None of this matters, though, without engagement." Relevant quote: > "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client." ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch This is slightly more complex with the social media business model: the product is the viewer, rather like a fish. The heroin-like bait to catch the viewer is the stream of short distractive entertainment content. The actual client buys the fish (the viewer) from the social media outfit. The actual client is an advertiser out to sell a product, a government out to push propaganda, a politician out to get votes, etc. The more interesting aspect of this is that the clients might be paying the social media providers to control the content stream as a means of manipulating their audience. Weapons manufacturers might want Facebook/Instagram/Twitter to bury anti-war content; corporate media giants might want independent outlets booted off the recommendation algorithm results; established political parties might want independents hidden from view; etc It's very plausible that this monetization model - i.e. not just the delivery of targeted advertising content to the 'engaged' audience, but also the targeted removal of competing content as a kind of shadow control of what that audience gets to see, is part of the revenue stream of Meta, Google, Twitter, etc. Of course, people will agree that China is doing this with TikTok, but many tend to get uncomfortable if asked if the US government and major corporations are also playing this game on Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.
- xapata 4y ago
  They don't need to pay for removal of competing content directly, because people only have so many hours in the day. If they pay to promote favorable content, the unfavorable content will be crowded out.
  - Banana699 4y ago
strogonoff 4y ago
> That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. Stop right there. What you mean is that their corporate wallets like it. These companies delude themselves if they consider “spend more time in the app” as an indicator for users liking it, in no sane world it is true. I like Mail.app because I need to spend so little time in it to get the most value out. I hate Instagram because it happens all the time that I missed a friend’s post because I didn’t scroll far enough. Curiously enough, this self-centered self-delusion only happens in UI teams of pseudo-free double-sided market “products” where you have to keep viewing ads to make the corp money. This business model also breaks how the market is supposed to work—the actual users and paying customers are now separate groups, users cannot vote with their wallets (or even leave, because the offering is free and my friends are here so the moat for competitors is infinite), and company’s interests are not aligned with theirs.
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  This is a really silly point frankly, and can be applied to any product people have ever gravitated towards. You might claim to not like tv but it still became the most used entertainment product for decades. Same goes for the newsfeed. Any social network or product with a newsfeed will easily beat one without for users using it. Whether utopians like yourself think people like it or not is irrelevant. It’s about survival. Not “corporate wallets”
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    What are those alternatives that you are comparing TV and newsfeed-powered social to? Point to a single product without newsfeed that lost to a product with newsfeed because of refusing to implement this feature.
    - np_tedious 4y ago
      MySpace?
thenerdhead 4y ago
A good perspective on the ever-shifting mediums. Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to engage in stuff you would not normally engage in out of societal norms, but is data driven to prove you can't look away? Most modern "personalized infinite feeds" are preying on these psychological tricks where we can't look away from something shocking, seductive, or comforting. i.e. show something painful and then show something pleasureful to play games with your dopamine and adrenaline. Technology will continue to get more persuasive until we find moderation with it. The medium will continue to evolve and we'll continue to increase our screentime year over year cutting into our sleep and work until we do so. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/multimedia/infographics/getmoving.html https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/multimedia/infographics/ge... I even wrote a book on this topic from the perspective of a millennial. While most of my mental health issues were because of my addiction to the internet/technology/media, I can only begin to wonder how this fares to the rest of the world given some of the known statistics about depression, anxiety, self-harm, and more at younger ages.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to engage in stuff you would not normally engage in I think "whole premise" is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is only so much "organic" engagement to be had. Some social media (e.g. Tumblr) don't try to reach too far beyond that. They're content in their niche. Facebook and TikTok, on the other hand, have infinite ambition and infinite appetite for engagement. They're well beyond the point where they need to employ manipulative dark patterns (and keep inventing new ones!) to keep those numbers up.
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
    > Facebook and TikTok, on the other hand, have infinite ambition and infinite appetite for engagement. They're well beyond the point where they need to employ manipulative dark patterns (and keep inventing new ones!) to keep those numbers up. Mind elaborating here? I'm interested in your perspective regarding social media not employing newly discovered dark patterns (infinite video feeds, shorter content, targeted ads, personalized algorithms, etc)
nassimsoftware 4y ago
I don't think we have solved image generation with DALLE-2 yet. There are still many challenges before we move on to video: - generating drawing that upon close inspection don't have obvious defects. - generate hand drawn text. - being able to replicate the same character along multiple angles consistently with the same style. I feel like this is going to become increasingly hard because there are many things in drawing that can't be capture quite well with words. It's analogous to code being more expressive than no-code drag and drop.
personjerry 4y ago
If you're an innovator and think along this trend, then you're fighting the fight in the trenches where Facebook and TikTok are already embedded and winning, and AI already promises to win the next round. For me, the question is where can there be a shift that causes the existing competition to become derailed altogether? And how can you help induce such a change, and ride the wave? For example, imagine a social shift away from the "online all the time" trend to "hanging out with people IRL", riding the end-of-covid wave.
- pixl97 4y ago
  If there is such a shift, it will be a paradigm shift and very difficult to predict before it happens.
- stevewatson301 4y ago
  Such shifts are more likely to happen due to legislation and lawsuits than people voluntarily opting out of using FB/TikTok. (Similar to how the Sackler family was responsible for the opioid crisis which was only brought under control by government action.)
  - erichocean 4y ago
    > the opioid crisis which was only brought under control by government action "Coming wave of opioid overdoses ‘will be worse than ever been before’" Source: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/07/coming-wave-of-opioid-overdoses-will-be-worse-than-ever-been-before/ https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/07/coming-wave-of... I guess there's still work to be done if this is the government having things "under control."
rconti 4y ago
> I saw someone recently complaining that Facebook was recommending to them…a very crass but probably pretty hilarious video. Their indignant response [was that] “the ranking must be broken.” Here is the thing: the ranking probably isn’t broken. He probably would love that video, but the fact that in order to engage with it he would have to go proactively click makes him feel bad. He doesn’t want to see himself as the type of person that clicks on things like that, even if he would enjoy it. I found this comment super-insightful. I generally hate online videos with a passion. I DO NOT click "recommended posts" or ads or videos or what I consider garbage. But that doesn't mean I don't sometimes get interested in a thumbnail I see until I realize what "they're" trying to get me to click on.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I absolutely loathe YouTube Face. If you've never heard of the term, it's that exaggerated, wide-eyed, often with an open-mouth, expression on most thumbnails. I know that at some psychological level it works, probably because it hijacks the part of our brain that is meant to respond to when a fellow human being in front of us makes that expression - there must be something dangerous going on behind us and we need to pay attention. Even credible channels do this, Linus Tech Tips has such thumbnails and I'm sure it measurably affects their view count. I just lament how so much of getting people to click on videos has become reduced to the kinds of tricks that work on babies. I mean that literally, if you've ever played with a toddler or seen caretakers playing with them, you'll notice they use the same kind of exaggerated expressions and gesticulation.
  - alt227 4y ago
    Veritasium has an excellent video exploring this exact topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
  - jatins 4y ago
    The problem is that it's not clear (at least to me) whether adding the "Youtube face" is making people click on the videos more, or is it just making YouTube push the video to a wider audience resulting in higher engagement. Is there some way to assert "Given the same audience of X people, adding such thumbnails results in more clicks"?
pixl97 4y ago
>The payoff, though, will not be “power” for these small creators: the implication of entertainment being dictated by recommendations and AI instead of reputation and ranking is that all of the power accrues to the platform doing the recommending. This is what these companies want. Take the power away from a few ultra powerful users (Kardashians for example), and retain that power for themselves.
- thebradbain 4y ago
  And yet... by doing this they're trying to socially engineer away something fundamental to all societies throughout humankind: people have been worshipping their influencers, celebrities, figureheads, idols, deities, demigods, and Gods their entire history. Even TikTok has its stars (and they're huge now).
  - meowkit 4y ago
    The atomisation of culture is evidence enough for me to believe that this erosion of worship is already under way. Its so much more diffuse. The cultural icons we each follow is so diverse already. I can imagine AI generated icons that only get to continue to persist if they can adequately capture the attention of X amount of productive apes.
rconti 4y ago
My question is, what happens to social media when it stops being social? I _liked_ the fact that everyone I knew in college was on Facebook, and _disliked_ having to remember what silly username my friend was using on Twitter this week, or how I knew this Joe Blow person I followed at some point for some reason. I _like_ seeing my friends' vacation photos and other friends commenting on them. I _hate_ how reels and stories move from social to broadcast. Why can't my friend group comment on an IG story and have a discussion? Why does it have to be in DMs? (Unless we do that stupid thing where you share out a scene from a story (ugh, yes, I realize how old it makes me that i don't even know what to call it) and tag everyone involved) The less a platform has the _kinds of content_ that drives the network effect, the less reason for there to be a network at all. It just becomes TV. And I use that comparison purposefully; television is extremely popular, I watch plenty of it myself. But without the active network effects of social media, what drives user-to-user engagement? How do you get new people to sign up, beyond "hey, look at this tiktok I saw"? Or is that enough?
slowmovintarget 4y ago
The Three Trends (according to the article): 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate 3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers of the brain... but not by much. Makes me wonder if there's a market for the equivalent of health food where we go back to social media and deliberately avoid "recommendation media" (which may be the most important two words in the entire post).
- froidpink 4y ago
  BeReal's growth is probably a good example of this kind of "organic" and "healthy" social media
  - alpha_squared 4y ago
    Disclosure: I haven't used BeReal. I fully expect BeReal's model to change in less than two years from now (probably within a year). I see it quickly devolving into tedium after a while. Users will disable notifications to post, become passive consumers. "Influencers" drive adoption of platforms and it's hard to be the same type of influencer unless you're constantly living that lifestyle, which almost no influencer today actually does.
    - prawn 4y ago
      This is true. Majority of influencers lean on a back catalogue of material, and remix it to maintain the pretext that they're living that lifestyle constantly. Even for people that could afford to live that life, it's exhausting to be switched on and shooting/editing material at all times.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  David Foster Wallace predicted it all in the 90s
gzer0 4y ago
"The implication of entertainment being dictated by recommendations and AI instead of reputation and ranking is that all of the power accrues to the platform doing the recommending." I found this quite profound.
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
A little bit dubious about the last one, it doesn't seem like a straightforward progression to me. But the first 2 for sure.
MintDice 4y ago
k12sosse 4y ago
This must be the whole "medium is the message" thing he was talking about
m3kw9 4y ago
The problem is current AI generation contain no creativity, they are trained from human made data set. And machine generated data set is also learnt from human data
- mlboss 4y ago
  I would argue that human creativity is also recombination of existing images/thoughts/experiences. There is no ghost in the machine who comes up with novel ideas that didn't exist before. Everything new is just a combination of old ideas combined in new ways.
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    That's a bleak view of humanity. I think there's a "spark" in actual humans, who will take content in a completely different direction than something ever seen before. Think Time Cube (https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/). Or Neil Breen movies. I just don't think an AI could ever put together something quite like that.
    - Ruthalas 4y ago
      I agree with your assertion, but the Time Cube site seems like the worst possible example. It strikes me as being as close to machine generated content as possible. I'm not sure I could have thought of any single thing that felt more like a GPT3 fever dream: disconnected assertions that are divorced from a underpinning understanding.
  - kareemsabri 4y ago
    So if we fed an AI with Beethoven we'd get to Miles Davis and 2Pac?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rsweeney21 4y ago
The leap from "recommending" content to "generating" content reminds me of the leap from cars that we drive on the ground and cars that fly. It seems like the future, but it's much further away than we think.
- jasongi 4y ago
  Generated content doesn't necessarily need the output to be entirely algorithmically generated. It'll probably initially use real people as meat puppets - with things like AI generated filters, scripts and prompts in order to generate content that hits the right niche, then use the recommendation algorithm as a fitness test - no need to autogenerate video content if people will do the hard bit for free.
rossdavidh 4y ago
"That was the problem with Twitter: it just wasn’t convenient for nearly enough people to figure out how to follow the right people." This was never the problem with Twitter. The problem with Twitter is that it has no option to turn of retweets globally; don't show me retweets from anyone, only original tweets. If it had this, so that I would only see original content from people I follow, I would be back on Twitter.
- a123b456c 4y ago
  They offer it on tweetdeck
fleddr 4y ago
There's so much wrong with this trend. First, from a purely operational and pragmatic point of view, I'm stunned how paranoid well established networks are about the Tiktok competition, willing to make existential changes to mimic them whilst potentially destroying themselves. Why can't there be differentiation? Why not improve your own network, fix its many issues, allow for some co-existence? "Innovate or die" is an exaggeration for Facebook and Youtube, they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Second, I'm shocked (but not really) how not a single of these companies (or governments) take a shred of responsibility in even thinking about the human impact. There's already a laundry list of serious problems associated with social media and the trajectory is to just escalate it even more? A machine rapidly feeding you short videos, many to be AI generated, as the ultimate "solution"? Third, we've already established how the combination of social media and misinformation can lead to fatalities (example: FB and Myanmar), political interference, escalating polarization and instability, and more. The only counter force, ineffective as it may be, would be real users pushing back and trying to "correct" things. The next generation has no such pushbacks. It's all just one recommendation engine with ultimate power. Do we even know what the fuck we're doing?
ansmithz42 4y ago
This is exactly "Fahrenheit 451".
rchaud 4y ago
The tweets from Sam Lessin quoted in the article seem deeply dystopian, particularly the idea that FB/IG's fundamental problem today is interface-based, something Tiktok has apparently solved. Currently, users actually have to make a decision to click to view something, e.g. comments on a post. Infinite scroll UI and pageless SPA frameworks fixed this to an extent, but apparently that's not enough anymore. Today, the algorithm "knows" that you want to watch this trashy sensationalist video, even though you aren't physically tapping the button to view it. So Tiktok's format of fullscreen autoplaying video is designed to pass that final hurdle: remove decision making from the user entirely. Throw AI-recommended (and soon, AI-generated) material at them, forever, until they physically exit the app. No wonder Zuck wanted a Facebook phone back in 2011. iOS and Android actually let you exit the FB app if you wanted to.
xrd 4y ago
For me the biggest reason to never install apps is that with my browser I never am force fed videos. I have to click them. If it's an app, they can shove them down my throat with autoplay. Not so with current browser policies. The world is going to shift to sheeple only using apps (shapples?) and those only using services inside a browser (browseers?). Browseers will be much happier and live richer lives.
CognitiveLens 4y ago
The 'Medium' trend seems to most off to me, but I've seen it repeated as truth by a number of people Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR A lot of people/companies don't seem to appreciate that the appeal of images and video come from the fact that they represent 'real' (or at least staged-real) events/people/places. Animated videos and scenes from movies seem like categorically different kinds of things, less likely to get attention in news feeds other than as fodder for memes. 3D graphics + VR are never going to be real, and I suspect will never (or not for a long time) have the engagement of images + videos despite being ostensibly more 'immersive'.
- pdinny 4y ago
  I strongly agree. The article presents the various media as existing with some inherent ordering of value or preference. Text is not less than Image in any sense, just as VR is not greater than Video. These media may have different characteristics in terms of desirability for business metrics (especially in terms of product differentiation) which make it seem like there is some ordering. Consider Twitter, which while it might not have the MAU of Facebook (a tall order!) is still a testament to the enduring value of text. And again, this isn't any case for Text being superior in any sense, but rather a way of pointing out that appetites for all of these media happily coexist and probably always will. A similarly poor ordering (from the past) might look something like: Medium: print (text) -> radio (audio) -> television (video) -> multimedia (CD-ROM hahaha) We know of course that audio has not become less relevant over time. OTOH the effort required for people to participate by creating works in these different media varies hugely. Text and Images are very accessible and are still far more accessible than Video (user research in my job suggests that they struggle to create quality video content more so than still images) and 3d graphics and VR are likely to remain inaccessible (relative to digital photography).

305 points by kaboro 4y ago

That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. That is also why you don't rely solely on your own preferences and behaviors for deciding what product features to build. Also interesting: 1. The Pre-Internet ‘People Magazine’ Era 2. Content from ‘your friends’ kills People Magazine 3. Kardashians/Professional ‘friends’ kill real friends 4. Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians 5. Next is pure-AI content which beats ‘algorithmic everyone’

swyx 4y ago
"the replacement of humans with machines will continue until morale improves"
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  My AI-generated content is being virtually consumed and clicked on by thousands of AI readers. No actual people in the loop. Happiness increases. I also have an AI that filters out AI generated content so I only see things sourced directly from people I know to be people. Granted, Cortana sometimes slips and gets it wrong and lets through something that obviously came from an AI... Hmm... I wonder how that happened. Happiness decreases.
jrm4 4y ago
At the risk of being overly optimistic: Number 4 is an interesting inflection point that could potentially (hopefully) sow the seeds of it's own destruction (or at least radical transformation?) Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much more "real person sharing real thing." Hence why I think 4 to 5 is very far from a sure bet. I'm not sure even what Pure AI could even meaningfully signify here.
- ketzo 4y ago
  If content-generation AI is given sufficient resources and training input, I think 4>5 is pretty much guaranteed. The recommendation systems that power "algorithmic everyone" are not optimizing for real human interaction, or real people sharing real things; they're optimizing for the absolute most engaging content that they can find. This is Kardashian-killing because no one person or brand -- not even Kim -- can create the most engaging content in the world on every single post; and even if they could, they can't do it at a rate to fill an entire feed. Sufficiently good recommendation systems kill the Kardashians because they can crawl through an ocean of user-generated content and find the winners. If you combine a sufficiently good content-generation AI with the data you glean from the world's best recommendation system, you can just create the most engaging possible content, without even knowing what that would be.
- jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  > Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much more "real person sharing real thing." I believe we are well into number 4 and let me tell you, neither the "person" or the "thing" feels "real". Everything is so contrived, scripted, architected, and manufactured that the entirety of social media feels like The Truman Show at this point.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    So, my take is the following: I still believe that it's all getting "more human," and that this isn't necessarily mutually exclusive of "contrived, scripted" etc. The difference is "Kardashianism" is filtered through big media selling ads, vs. e.g. "TikTok" -- at the point of creation -- is filtered through nothing but the sensibilities of the creator and mostly stays what it was at the point of creation. Ergo, much more human.
- telchior 4y ago
  I don't think that "Algorithmic Everyone", the one you're phrasing as "real human interaction" is really either everyone or real humans. Instead, it's turning a handful of Kardashians into a million Kardashians. The number of performers, and niches, vastly grows but it's still all performance. I think that's one reason that a lot of kids love TikTok but adults generally can't stand it. Kids are looking for sources that show them how to act. TikTok is basically a giant tips channel. Here's how to be silly, here's how to dance, here's how to be a goth... It's like an enormous highschool, but if the highschool were completely made up of amateur actors trying to get the most attention.
trebbble 4y ago
I'm so glad the gap between "we can keep very-long-term records" and "AI now dominates content creation" is going to be large enough, even for very recent things like video games, that I'll have enough excellent "content" to last multiple lifetimes without ever having to pay attention to the AI stuff.

mjamesaustin 4y ago

Does an addict "like" the thing they are addicted to? Or have the chemical responses in their brain been manipulated to the advantage of the person selling the addiction? Recommendation media is the perfection of a system that uses our dopamine response to control the behavior of those viewing it. At some point, I think we can agree that this isn't good for those consuming the content, especially as research shows that increased consumption decreases feelings of happiness and increases loneliness.

jkkramer 4y ago
A rule of thumb I sometimes use to assess products, including ones I've built: Looking back at the last year, are you (or your users) happy with the time spent using the product? Do you/they regret it? Juicing short-term engagement can be effective for startups, but it isn't everything, and doesn't necessarily lead to lasting value.
deleted 4y ago
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AndrewKemendo 4y ago
There's a middle period in addiction where you still get novel enjoyment from the thing you're doing, but finally realize it's bad for you. It seems to be around that time when people choose a path - either quitting that thing or leaning into it, consequences be damned. So yes they still like it, but the ratio between enjoyment and suffering starts to invert such that it's beyond the point of diminishing returns. Beyond that point you are mentally or physically dependent, and it starts to become simply avoiding the withdrawls. The addictive behavior becomes the new normal even if it's totally destructive. This is why addiction is so hard Note here: most people are thinking about intoxicants when reading the above, but it's equally true for anything in unhealthy amounts (food, games, running, collecting stamps etc...)
- pixl97 4y ago
  Addiction becomes more problematic when 'everyone is doing it', as you say with food/games, these are things everywhere in society and are hard to get away from. I'd say it's just as difficult to get away from social media since there is no general stigma that it is bad.

upupandup 4y ago

im afraid this short attention optimized dopamine manipulation system is going to be deterimental for our collective mental and cognitive capacity, especially with covid. in particular im fearful of the impact on young developing minds, this is literally setting them up for failure or maybe this is the end goal?

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
I am on a crusade to regulate my wife's instagram usage and will pretty much ban social media for my children (or at-least heavily regulate it). My wife agrees that she is much happier on the aggregate when she uses instagram less. Having worked in industries close to social media, the people here have no qualms about doing anything possible to increase revenue, whats worse is how smart some of the people are.
- arwineap 4y ago
  > whats worse is how smart some of the people are Smart people can use instagram, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
  - strikelaserclaw 4y ago
    i meant more like those who are doing whatever to increase revenue for their companies not actual users themselves.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    That sentence referred to the people working at Instagram, not the people using Instagram. The poster meant that it is sad that smart people spend so much time and energy trying to get people addicted to these things.
tboyd47 4y ago
It already has. The ultimate expression of this dopamine mill is on-demand porn, and that's already run its course addicting practically the entire population and giving them sexual dysfunction. Social media is like "porn lite."

outsidetheparty 4y ago

“the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit.” I think what it actually revealed is that you can sometimes force people to accept something other than their stated preference, if you do it gradually enough and leave them no choice in the matter.

benjaminwootton 4y ago

There is something about the TikTok style swiping videos which just hits differently. I am far from the demographic for TikTok, but find it super addictive so just keep it off my phone. I barely use Instagram, but having checked in a few times recently I find myself mindlessly swiping their “Reels” for hours before pulling myself away from it. YouTube is my goto timewaste, but now when I pick it up on mobile I find myself in their “Shorts” feature which is the same kinda thing. Just that cycle of short videos in rapid fire…. humour, interesting fact, attractive woman, aspirational products, beautiful scenery, political argument then back around the cycle again is just like digital crack. Just say no!

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
same here with the youtube/tik tok shorts, a barrage of video diarrhea to make my brain light up.
- benjaminwootton 4y ago
  You can almost feel it grabbing your brain, and it takes real will to stop scrolling and get up. These products are really powerful.
  - dopeboy 4y ago
    I can feel the "mush" sensation after watching TikTok too much. It's really a whole new level.
mike10921 4y ago
YouTube is my time waster as well (besides when I actually watch technical info). YouTube Shorts are decent but I must keep the volume off because for some reason creators think they must add the most annoying music to any video clip they upload. Similar to the way you describe TikTok I feel like I need a cold shower after endlessly scrolling those videos.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago

ape4 4y ago

We hate it but we also wish we'd invented it.

sytse 4y ago

Great article. The author mentions: "Machine learning models can now create text and images for zero marginal cost". Another step was just taken in this direction with TikTok launching an 'AI greenscreen' based on text prompts https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/15/tiktok-in-app-text-to-image-ai-generator/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/15/tiktok-in-app-text-to-imag...

photochemsyn 4y ago

You have to dig through this entire article to get to the punchline, but here it is: > "These AI challenges, I would add, apply to monetization as well: one of the outcomes of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes is that advertising needs to shift from a deterministic model to a probabilistic one; the companies with the most data and the greatest amount of computing resources are going to make that shift more quickly and effectively, and I expect Meta to be top of the list. None of this matters, though, without engagement." Relevant quote: > "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client." ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch This is slightly more complex with the social media business model: the product is the viewer, rather like a fish. The heroin-like bait to catch the viewer is the stream of short distractive entertainment content. The actual client buys the fish (the viewer) from the social media outfit. The actual client is an advertiser out to sell a product, a government out to push propaganda, a politician out to get votes, etc. The more interesting aspect of this is that the clients might be paying the social media providers to control the content stream as a means of manipulating their audience. Weapons manufacturers might want Facebook/Instagram/Twitter to bury anti-war content; corporate media giants might want independent outlets booted off the recommendation algorithm results; established political parties might want independents hidden from view; etc It's very plausible that this monetization model - i.e. not just the delivery of targeted advertising content to the 'engaged' audience, but also the targeted removal of competing content as a kind of shadow control of what that audience gets to see, is part of the revenue stream of Meta, Google, Twitter, etc. Of course, people will agree that China is doing this with TikTok, but many tend to get uncomfortable if asked if the US government and major corporations are also playing this game on Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.

xapata 4y ago
They don't need to pay for removal of competing content directly, because people only have so many hours in the day. If they pay to promote favorable content, the unfavorable content will be crowded out.
- Banana699 4y ago

strogonoff 4y ago

> That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. Stop right there. What you mean is that their corporate wallets like it. These companies delude themselves if they consider “spend more time in the app” as an indicator for users liking it, in no sane world it is true. I like Mail.app because I need to spend so little time in it to get the most value out. I hate Instagram because it happens all the time that I missed a friend’s post because I didn’t scroll far enough. Curiously enough, this self-centered self-delusion only happens in UI teams of pseudo-free double-sided market “products” where you have to keep viewing ads to make the corp money. This business model also breaks how the market is supposed to work—the actual users and paying customers are now separate groups, users cannot vote with their wallets (or even leave, because the offering is free and my friends are here so the moat for competitors is infinite), and company’s interests are not aligned with theirs.

cloutchaser 4y ago
This is a really silly point frankly, and can be applied to any product people have ever gravitated towards. You might claim to not like tv but it still became the most used entertainment product for decades. Same goes for the newsfeed. Any social network or product with a newsfeed will easily beat one without for users using it. Whether utopians like yourself think people like it or not is irrelevant. It’s about survival. Not “corporate wallets”
- strogonoff 4y ago
  What are those alternatives that you are comparing TV and newsfeed-powered social to? Point to a single product without newsfeed that lost to a product with newsfeed because of refusing to implement this feature.
  - np_tedious 4y ago
    MySpace?

thenerdhead 4y ago

A good perspective on the ever-shifting mediums. Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to engage in stuff you would not normally engage in out of societal norms, but is data driven to prove you can't look away? Most modern "personalized infinite feeds" are preying on these psychological tricks where we can't look away from something shocking, seductive, or comforting. i.e. show something painful and then show something pleasureful to play games with your dopamine and adrenaline. Technology will continue to get more persuasive until we find moderation with it. The medium will continue to evolve and we'll continue to increase our screentime year over year cutting into our sleep and work until we do so. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/multimedia/infographics/getmoving.html https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/multimedia/infographics/ge... I even wrote a book on this topic from the perspective of a millennial. While most of my mental health issues were because of my addiction to the internet/technology/media, I can only begin to wonder how this fares to the rest of the world given some of the known statistics about depression, anxiety, self-harm, and more at younger ages.

notacoward 4y ago
> Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to engage in stuff you would not normally engage in I think "whole premise" is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is only so much "organic" engagement to be had. Some social media (e.g. Tumblr) don't try to reach too far beyond that. They're content in their niche. Facebook and TikTok, on the other hand, have infinite ambition and infinite appetite for engagement. They're well beyond the point where they need to employ manipulative dark patterns (and keep inventing new ones!) to keep those numbers up.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  > Facebook and TikTok, on the other hand, have infinite ambition and infinite appetite for engagement. They're well beyond the point where they need to employ manipulative dark patterns (and keep inventing new ones!) to keep those numbers up. Mind elaborating here? I'm interested in your perspective regarding social media not employing newly discovered dark patterns (infinite video feeds, shorter content, targeted ads, personalized algorithms, etc)

nassimsoftware 4y ago

I don't think we have solved image generation with DALLE-2 yet. There are still many challenges before we move on to video: - generating drawing that upon close inspection don't have obvious defects. - generate hand drawn text. - being able to replicate the same character along multiple angles consistently with the same style. I feel like this is going to become increasingly hard because there are many things in drawing that can't be capture quite well with words. It's analogous to code being more expressive than no-code drag and drop.

personjerry 4y ago

If you're an innovator and think along this trend, then you're fighting the fight in the trenches where Facebook and TikTok are already embedded and winning, and AI already promises to win the next round. For me, the question is where can there be a shift that causes the existing competition to become derailed altogether? And how can you help induce such a change, and ride the wave? For example, imagine a social shift away from the "online all the time" trend to "hanging out with people IRL", riding the end-of-covid wave.

pixl97 4y ago
If there is such a shift, it will be a paradigm shift and very difficult to predict before it happens.
stevewatson301 4y ago
Such shifts are more likely to happen due to legislation and lawsuits than people voluntarily opting out of using FB/TikTok. (Similar to how the Sackler family was responsible for the opioid crisis which was only brought under control by government action.)
- erichocean 4y ago
  > the opioid crisis which was only brought under control by government action "Coming wave of opioid overdoses ‘will be worse than ever been before’" Source: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/07/coming-wave-of-opioid-overdoses-will-be-worse-than-ever-been-before/ https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/07/coming-wave-of... I guess there's still work to be done if this is the government having things "under control."

rconti 4y ago

> I saw someone recently complaining that Facebook was recommending to them…a very crass but probably pretty hilarious video. Their indignant response [was that] “the ranking must be broken.” Here is the thing: the ranking probably isn’t broken. He probably would love that video, but the fact that in order to engage with it he would have to go proactively click makes him feel bad. He doesn’t want to see himself as the type of person that clicks on things like that, even if he would enjoy it. I found this comment super-insightful. I generally hate online videos with a passion. I DO NOT click "recommended posts" or ads or videos or what I consider garbage. But that doesn't mean I don't sometimes get interested in a thumbnail I see until I realize what "they're" trying to get me to click on.

BitwiseFool 4y ago
I absolutely loathe YouTube Face. If you've never heard of the term, it's that exaggerated, wide-eyed, often with an open-mouth, expression on most thumbnails. I know that at some psychological level it works, probably because it hijacks the part of our brain that is meant to respond to when a fellow human being in front of us makes that expression - there must be something dangerous going on behind us and we need to pay attention. Even credible channels do this, Linus Tech Tips has such thumbnails and I'm sure it measurably affects their view count. I just lament how so much of getting people to click on videos has become reduced to the kinds of tricks that work on babies. I mean that literally, if you've ever played with a toddler or seen caretakers playing with them, you'll notice they use the same kind of exaggerated expressions and gesticulation.
- alt227 4y ago
  Veritasium has an excellent video exploring this exact topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
- jatins 4y ago
  The problem is that it's not clear (at least to me) whether adding the "Youtube face" is making people click on the videos more, or is it just making YouTube push the video to a wider audience resulting in higher engagement. Is there some way to assert "Given the same audience of X people, adding such thumbnails results in more clicks"?

pixl97 4y ago

>The payoff, though, will not be “power” for these small creators: the implication of entertainment being dictated by recommendations and AI instead of reputation and ranking is that all of the power accrues to the platform doing the recommending. This is what these companies want. Take the power away from a few ultra powerful users (Kardashians for example), and retain that power for themselves.

thebradbain 4y ago
And yet... by doing this they're trying to socially engineer away something fundamental to all societies throughout humankind: people have been worshipping their influencers, celebrities, figureheads, idols, deities, demigods, and Gods their entire history. Even TikTok has its stars (and they're huge now).
- meowkit 4y ago
  The atomisation of culture is evidence enough for me to believe that this erosion of worship is already under way. Its so much more diffuse. The cultural icons we each follow is so diverse already. I can imagine AI generated icons that only get to continue to persist if they can adequately capture the attention of X amount of productive apes.

rconti 4y ago

My question is, what happens to social media when it stops being social? I _liked_ the fact that everyone I knew in college was on Facebook, and _disliked_ having to remember what silly username my friend was using on Twitter this week, or how I knew this Joe Blow person I followed at some point for some reason. I _like_ seeing my friends' vacation photos and other friends commenting on them. I _hate_ how reels and stories move from social to broadcast. Why can't my friend group comment on an IG story and have a discussion? Why does it have to be in DMs? (Unless we do that stupid thing where you share out a scene from a story (ugh, yes, I realize how old it makes me that i don't even know what to call it) and tag everyone involved) The less a platform has the _kinds of content_ that drives the network effect, the less reason for there to be a network at all. It just becomes TV. And I use that comparison purposefully; television is extremely popular, I watch plenty of it myself. But without the active network effects of social media, what drives user-to-user engagement? How do you get new people to sign up, beyond "hey, look at this tiktok I saw"? Or is that enough?

slowmovintarget 4y ago

The Three Trends (according to the article): 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate 3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers of the brain... but not by much. Makes me wonder if there's a market for the equivalent of health food where we go back to social media and deliberately avoid "recommendation media" (which may be the most important two words in the entire post).

froidpink 4y ago
BeReal's growth is probably a good example of this kind of "organic" and "healthy" social media
- alpha_squared 4y ago
  Disclosure: I haven't used BeReal. I fully expect BeReal's model to change in less than two years from now (probably within a year). I see it quickly devolving into tedium after a while. Users will disable notifications to post, become passive consumers. "Influencers" drive adoption of platforms and it's hard to be the same type of influencer unless you're constantly living that lifestyle, which almost no influencer today actually does.
  - prawn 4y ago
    This is true. Majority of influencers lean on a back catalogue of material, and remix it to maintain the pretext that they're living that lifestyle constantly. Even for people that could afford to live that life, it's exhausting to be switched on and shooting/editing material at all times.
Invictus0 4y ago
David Foster Wallace predicted it all in the 90s

gzer0 4y ago

"The implication of entertainment being dictated by recommendations and AI instead of reputation and ranking is that all of the power accrues to the platform doing the recommending." I found this quite profound.

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago

A little bit dubious about the last one, it doesn't seem like a straightforward progression to me. But the first 2 for sure.

MintDice 4y ago

k12sosse 4y ago

This must be the whole "medium is the message" thing he was talking about

m3kw9 4y ago

The problem is current AI generation contain no creativity, they are trained from human made data set. And machine generated data set is also learnt from human data

mlboss 4y ago
I would argue that human creativity is also recombination of existing images/thoughts/experiences. There is no ghost in the machine who comes up with novel ideas that didn't exist before. Everything new is just a combination of old ideas combined in new ways.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  That's a bleak view of humanity. I think there's a "spark" in actual humans, who will take content in a completely different direction than something ever seen before. Think Time Cube (https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/). Or Neil Breen movies. I just don't think an AI could ever put together something quite like that.
  - Ruthalas 4y ago
    I agree with your assertion, but the Time Cube site seems like the worst possible example. It strikes me as being as close to machine generated content as possible. I'm not sure I could have thought of any single thing that felt more like a GPT3 fever dream: disconnected assertions that are divorced from a underpinning understanding.
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  So if we fed an AI with Beethoven we'd get to Miles Davis and 2Pac?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rsweeney21 4y ago

The leap from "recommending" content to "generating" content reminds me of the leap from cars that we drive on the ground and cars that fly. It seems like the future, but it's much further away than we think.

jasongi 4y ago
Generated content doesn't necessarily need the output to be entirely algorithmically generated. It'll probably initially use real people as meat puppets - with things like AI generated filters, scripts and prompts in order to generate content that hits the right niche, then use the recommendation algorithm as a fitness test - no need to autogenerate video content if people will do the hard bit for free.

rossdavidh 4y ago

"That was the problem with Twitter: it just wasn’t convenient for nearly enough people to figure out how to follow the right people." This was never the problem with Twitter. The problem with Twitter is that it has no option to turn of retweets globally; don't show me retweets from anyone, only original tweets. If it had this, so that I would only see original content from people I follow, I would be back on Twitter.

a123b456c 4y ago
They offer it on tweetdeck

fleddr 4y ago

There's so much wrong with this trend. First, from a purely operational and pragmatic point of view, I'm stunned how paranoid well established networks are about the Tiktok competition, willing to make existential changes to mimic them whilst potentially destroying themselves. Why can't there be differentiation? Why not improve your own network, fix its many issues, allow for some co-existence? "Innovate or die" is an exaggeration for Facebook and Youtube, they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Second, I'm shocked (but not really) how not a single of these companies (or governments) take a shred of responsibility in even thinking about the human impact. There's already a laundry list of serious problems associated with social media and the trajectory is to just escalate it even more? A machine rapidly feeding you short videos, many to be AI generated, as the ultimate "solution"? Third, we've already established how the combination of social media and misinformation can lead to fatalities (example: FB and Myanmar), political interference, escalating polarization and instability, and more. The only counter force, ineffective as it may be, would be real users pushing back and trying to "correct" things. The next generation has no such pushbacks. It's all just one recommendation engine with ultimate power. Do we even know what the fuck we're doing?

ansmithz42 4y ago

This is exactly "Fahrenheit 451".

rchaud 4y ago

The tweets from Sam Lessin quoted in the article seem deeply dystopian, particularly the idea that FB/IG's fundamental problem today is interface-based, something Tiktok has apparently solved. Currently, users actually have to make a decision to click to view something, e.g. comments on a post. Infinite scroll UI and pageless SPA frameworks fixed this to an extent, but apparently that's not enough anymore. Today, the algorithm "knows" that you want to watch this trashy sensationalist video, even though you aren't physically tapping the button to view it. So Tiktok's format of fullscreen autoplaying video is designed to pass that final hurdle: remove decision making from the user entirely. Throw AI-recommended (and soon, AI-generated) material at them, forever, until they physically exit the app. No wonder Zuck wanted a Facebook phone back in 2011. iOS and Android actually let you exit the FB app if you wanted to.

xrd 4y ago

For me the biggest reason to never install apps is that with my browser I never am force fed videos. I have to click them. If it's an app, they can shove them down my throat with autoplay. Not so with current browser policies. The world is going to shift to sheeple only using apps (shapples?) and those only using services inside a browser (browseers?). Browseers will be much happier and live richer lives.

CognitiveLens 4y ago

The 'Medium' trend seems to most off to me, but I've seen it repeated as truth by a number of people Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR A lot of people/companies don't seem to appreciate that the appeal of images and video come from the fact that they represent 'real' (or at least staged-real) events/people/places. Animated videos and scenes from movies seem like categorically different kinds of things, less likely to get attention in news feeds other than as fodder for memes. 3D graphics + VR are never going to be real, and I suspect will never (or not for a long time) have the engagement of images + videos despite being ostensibly more 'immersive'.

pdinny 4y ago
I strongly agree. The article presents the various media as existing with some inherent ordering of value or preference. Text is not less than Image in any sense, just as VR is not greater than Video. These media may have different characteristics in terms of desirability for business metrics (especially in terms of product differentiation) which make it seem like there is some ordering. Consider Twitter, which while it might not have the MAU of Facebook (a tall order!) is still a testament to the enduring value of text. And again, this isn't any case for Text being superior in any sense, but rather a way of pointing out that appetites for all of these media happily coexist and probably always will. A similarly poor ordering (from the past) might look something like: Medium: print (text) -> radio (audio) -> television (video) -> multimedia (CD-ROM hahaha) We know of course that audio has not become less relevant over time. OTOH the effort required for people to participate by creating works in these different media varies hugely. Text and Images are very accessible and are still far more accessible than Video (user research in my job suggests that they struggle to create quality video content more so than still images) and 3d graphics and VR are likely to remain inaccessible (relative to digital photography).