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The Three Trends (according to the article): 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate 3. UI: clic

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
- skyyler 4y ago
  I've heard this sentiment before, could you explain what you mean?
  - ZantaWB 4y ago
    He touches on this idea a lot, but most deeply in Infinite Jest where the parallels between between addiction to media and addiction to drugs is a major theme. In that story people have developed 'Entertainments,' basically video segments. Someone makes an Entertainment so unbelievably good that anyone who watches it is immediately stupefied and has no will to do anything but watch the Entertainment over and over. This Entertainment becomes a potent terrorist weapon since it can essentially take out anyone to whom it's broadcast.
    - swyx 4y ago
      see also Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death (fantastic title) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death they were calling this out since 1984 - hard to distinguish between luddism and genuine problems
      - reginaldo 4y ago
        The book "Technopoly", by Postman, is also very well worth a reading. But I'd say the most relevant to this trend is "The disappearance of childhood". The book's thesis is that childhood is a modern invention, in that, before the printing press, and mass education / literacy, there was no need for childhood as a learning period. In the middle ages, childhood ended at age 7, as soon as children became more or less self sufficient in their bodily functions. Literacy requires effort, and protected time to acquire analytical skills that are not natural to humans. Childhood was, then, embraced, because it's the way to get literacy. All-encompassing technologies that require no effort, e.g. TV or, as it appears to be the case, AR, might end the need for childhood, hence the book title. Among the novel technologies, the computer would be the one to "save" childhood, but only if society requires active (as opposed to passive) competency with computer technology. Quoting Postman: "The only technology that has this capacity is the computer. In order to program a computer, one must, in essence, learn a language. This means that one must have control over complex analytical skills similar to those required of a fully literate person, and for which special training is required. Should it be deemed necessary that everyone must know how computers work, how they impose their special world-view, how they alter our definition of judgment—that is, should it be deemed necessary that there be universal computer literacy—it is conceivable that the schooling of the young will increase in importance and a youth culture different from adult culture might be sustained. But such a development would depend on many different factors. The potential effects of a medium can be rendered impotent by the uses to which the medium is put. For example, radio, by its nature, has the potential to amplify and celebrate the power and poetry of human speech, and there are parts of the world in which radio is used to do this. In America, partly as a result of competition with television, radio has become merely an adjunct of the music industry. And, as a consequence, sustained, articulate, and mature speech is almost entirely absent from the airwaves \(with the magnificent exception of National Public Radio\). Thus, it is not inevitable that the computer will be used to promote sequential, logical, and complex thought among the mass of people. There are, for example, economic and political interests that would be better served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer games, to use and be used by computers without understanding. In this way the computer would remain mysterious and under the control of a bureaucratic elite. There would be no need to educate the young, and childhood could, without obstruction, continue on its journey to oblivion."
ssalazar 4y ago
> By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. Doesn't seem all that different from 99% of media consumption thats existed in my lifetime.
- csixty4 4y ago
  yeah that's basically describing broadcast tv & radio
  - Banana699 4y ago
    None of those are AI-generated (therefore don't have the potential massive automated scale) or auto-play.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      are you sure? it sounds like the exact same playlist on every station with the same owner in the same market with such little care about the content in the playlist but only based on an algorithm. so maybe AI === brain dead corporate owners?
      - mftb 4y ago
        You can't ignore matters of degree. It does sound similar, but just by reducing the content chunk length to ~20 secs, they've dramatically improved the algorithmic manipulation and ad insertion (from their point of view), making it all far more effective. In the old model people left the tv droning in the background, in the new model, people are riveted by their phones (with 2nd and 3rd screens (and radio (and billboards)) droning in the background).
      - ajmurmann 4y ago
        IMO the differ here is less about AI vs human curated, but curated/generated for a very broad audience vs one specific consumer, ideally live as their mood or interests change. We aren't there yet with the highly dynamic mood and interest changes (e.g. interest fading after 5 Dr pimple popper videos, let's throw in some wingsuit stuff), but it's on the same trajectory. Address broad audience -> address smaller, niche audiences -> address individuals -> address individuals in the moment
dzuc 4y ago
> 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" See: https://www.are.na/ https://www.are.na/
jjeaff 4y ago
Hmm, so basically you just sink into an overstuffed recliner and stare into a huge screen while it feeds you content interspersed with commercials?
- 62951413 4y ago
  Idiocracy was a documentary
- mike00632 4y ago
  How much is this recliner you speak of? Can I pay to skip ads?
josefresco 4y ago
Reminds me of the Pixar movie Wall-E
- sh4rks 4y ago
  That would fit under the "video" category
- monkeydust 4y ago
  I keep thinking of Wall-E more frequently recently - with macro trends such as global warming , automation as and great resignation plus Elon and his rockets.
- 0000011111 4y ago
  Its the next step of facebook - meta. Think ready player one.
seydor 4y ago
They remind of the characteristics of TV just with different technologies and AI generation instead of sitcoms.
gonehome 4y ago
Urbit is trying to build the tools that enable this (in part by fixing the ad driven engagement incentives that lead to centralization and the current state). One interesting bit is if you’re making vegetables when everyone else is giving away heroin it’s not enough to just to make great vegetables, you really need to offer something that can’t exist outside of what you’ve built because your core technology does something different. I think Urbit’s distribution and handling of auth could be that for distributed DevEx and building collaborative apps in a way that’s way simpler than on the current web stack. It’s not quite there yet but there’s a path to this reality and success is among the potential outcomes.
- elefanten 4y ago
  Do you have any recommended introduction to Urbit that touches on these possibilities in particular?
  - gonehome 4y ago
    Which particular ones? The DevEx auth stuff or the incentive fixing bit? The ID model is probably where I'd start since it's what fixes spam/moderation problem in a way that can actually work without centralization. When IDs have a small, but non-zero cost spam becomes uneconomical and it's easy to block an ID. IDs also accrue pseudonymous reputation. From there you can start to fix a lot of the other stuff. The DevEx bit also heavily depends on that. When you build the OS to handle IDs you move the abstraction up the stack. Modern operating systems don't do this in part because they were built before the web. As a result modern operating systems are largely just machines user's use to open a web browser and every centralized web application has to rebuild their entire auth stack and all of the collaboration tooling. They're incentivized to do this and be incompatible with everything else because centralization tends to lead to ad-driven business models and all the incentive problems associated with that. If the OS handled IDs and collaboration you could just build your app, distribute it to the network and rely on built in OS libraries to do the complex work relying on guarantees from the OS itself. The users wouldn't need accounts on a bunch of centralized services. People have tried to do this on the unix stack, but it fails for a few reasons[0][1]. It's not impossible to build something else that could work though and rethinking the stack from first principles leads to something that could work. Imagine if all linux users could just dm each other because the OS itself handled encrypted communication between IDs. You could build and distribute linux apps without a mess of complexity just by publishing it to your node. You get the capability to build really collaborative applications out of the box because of a lot of these guarantees without having to give up control. There's a lot more possible than this in this model - I think it's a path to escape the local maximum we've been trapped in and get closer to the web the 90s cypherpunks imagined (and the personal computer hackers before them). [0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra... [1]: https://urbit.org/overview https://urbit.org/overview
cwkoss 4y ago
VR is never going to be a replacement for short form video. Casual passive consumption of video benefits from being able to fit in between other activities easily. I'm never going to want an immersive experience when I have 2 minutes to kill waiting for a friend to show up at a bar - I just want easily digestible content snacks.
- nomel 4y ago
  To be fair, I think most everyone agrees that XR is the future, not VR. XR could easily take the replacement.
  - bmazed 4y ago
    over/under 2040 ?
    - evouga 4y ago
      Under. Way under. Google Glass's spectacular failure had a chilling effect on the entire industry, but it failed due to (1) lack of killer apps, (2) poor aesthetics, and (3) consumer concern about privacy. But ML has revolutionized image and video processing, Apple etc. could design a less hideous headset, and nobody cares about privacy anymore.
      - nomel 4y ago
        > could design a less hideous headset, and nobody cares about privacy anymore. I think it would help to not make most of the promotional material about video recording, and not make a huge camera the most visible feature. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Quest lineup, including rumored Cambria and Apple renders, obscure the forward looking cameras. Google Glass picture, which looks like a webcam on your face: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/19/google-glass-advice-smartglasses-glasshole https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/19/google-gl...
        4y ago
thelock85 4y ago
This reminds me of the evolution of the slot machine (as read in Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head). A rough analog would be: 1. Medium: Mechanical reel > Digital reel 2. Gameplay: Fixed odds > Adjustable odds > Programmatic adaptive odds 3. Experience: Pull the lever and win or lose > Pull the lever and win even if you lose (e.g. get back change) > Swipe a card and win even if you lose > Swipe a card and watch the game auto-play until you're out of money After reading that book (in 2014), I made my last Facebook post (the history of the slot machine) and promptly downloaded my data and deleted my account. I'm paraphrasing but Crawford's point was basically that social media is a socio-emotional slot machine.
- BigHatLogan 4y ago
  Fantastic book. The stories about the slot machine players who wear black pants so that they can urinate without being noticed was shocking, to say the least. They are so addicted to the machines that they won't even get up to use the restroom. The phrase he used, "playing to extinction", very much reminds me of what's happening now across most entertainment categories, broadly speaking (autoplay, loot boxes, slot machine-style gaming content, etc.)
  - HappySweeney 4y ago
    It isn't so much that they are addicted (though they are), but that someone will take their spot while they are up.
    - jonny_eh 4y ago
      That's just a rationalization they tell themselves.
      - HappySweeney 4y ago
        It's more than that. In a game like roulette, probability has no memory. In slots, the payout must come eventually, and playing losing rounds only brings you closer to that. There are slots players just waiting for others to go bust so they can swoop in. Also, one would hope that those that are so addicted that they are fine to just haul-off and piss themselves would be able to think ahead and simply wear a diaper.
nomel 4y ago
> It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers of the brain I don't think we'll ever reach that. I'm sure there will be non-invasive methods, soon enough.
croes 4y ago
Do you remember the passengers of the Axiom in WALL-E?
shalmanese 4y ago
The final social network will be named Tasp.
benreesman 4y ago
You might enjoy The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1]. It addresses these themes quite directly. The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social media: liberals like me and the many libertarians on here usually feel that the War on Drugs has been a catastrophe, alongside pretty much all prohibition aimed at people who are turning to escapism because the rungs of the real-world achievement ladder have been knocked out above them. I personally believe that explosive growth in escapism (see: opioid crisis) is driven by shitty opportunities in the real world. There is always going to be some set of highly potent diversions, and there will always be some fraction of the population that has a hard enough time with them to need professional help. But IMO none of Internet pornography, painkillers, video games, or crazy-optimized recommender systems are going to destroy lives and societies in job lots if those societies have high mobility in real-word achievement. So, not our society right now. I'm probably biased having worked in social media in my life, but the flip side is that I also know how how the sausage is made, I think that sort of balances out. Everyone has to form their own opinion here, my point can be TLDR'd as: "decriminalize drugs" and simultaneously "fuck TikTok" isn't really a consistent worldview. It's reasonable to say "fuck marketing TikTok to children" alongside "decriminalize drugs", and I'd probably agree with both. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  There is most definitely something different at play here, though I can't point out exactly what. It's hard to imagine a 60-year old grandmother hooked on crack, porn or painkillers, but I know several who spend 8+ hours a day glued to a screen playing Candy Crush.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    We might come from different socio-economic backgrounds then, because the idea of a 60-year old grandmother addicted to painkillers far in excess of medical need is depressingly mundane to me.
scottmcdot 4y ago
Can I coin the term "recommedia"?
- austinjp 4y ago
  "Recommercial"
evouga 4y ago
"Medium" and "AI" are spot-on IMO, but the "UI" track seems suspect to me. "Click" and "Tap" are essentially the same thing (on a desktop vs. on a mobile device): the user actively selecting what content to view next. So are "scroll" and "autoplay" (for text/image and video content, respectively). In the former, the user has agency over what to view, and in the latter, the transition is automated. I'm very skeptical that fully automated UI will ever replace giving the user a small selection of recommended items.
- zild3d 4y ago
  > "Click" and "Tap" are essentially the same thing Click in the article refers to plain old web navigation. There are links on the page, you move the mouse around and click on whichever one you want. Tap is referring to "Stories" interaction, which is more narrowed and less user choice than click. A story is playing, you tap anywhere on the screen and the next story replaces it and begins playing. I actually think "tap" and "swipe" are basically the same? They are both just a "give me the next one please" interaction. But the rest do progress from more user-directed to more computer-controlled. (Click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay)
  - prawn 4y ago
    I think a distinction between tap and swipe are that a tap progresses a discrete amount whereas swiping is less discriminating. Almost feels like the attention span is shorter. If tapping is turning a page in a magazine, swiping is more like flicking through the pages and getting glances at content before stopping at something you like.
- eloisius 4y ago
  > I'm very skeptical that fully automated UI will ever replace giving the user a small selection of recommended items. The TikTok fyp is vastly better than the Instagram discover tab, which gives you a menu of videos as jumping off point before you get sucked into scrollhole. I agree about autoscroll though. Sometimes I want to watch a video like 10 times, and feel very annoyed when Instagram had the auto scroll feature. I think it's gone now. Instead it just nudges the video up with a little messages that tells me to scroll for more. I always thought that must be a first-time user tutorial, but it never stops, so either it's broken or it's broken.
ru552 4y ago
What you describe as the "end of the line totally passive consumption of endorphins" we already have. It comes in various forms of drugs and you can pick the type of world blotting experience you desire.
Kiro 4y ago
> a wire into the pleasure centers of the brain Sounds like the dream. I hope I live to experience it.
cratermoon 4y ago
Allow me to recommend Jenny Odell's book, How to Do Nothing[1], or watch a ~30m talk by Jenny[2] 1 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-nothing-by-jenny-odell/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-no... 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dveUrpp6vs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dveUrpp6vs8
xivzgrev 4y ago
Yes this is the end game. We have pleasure and pain centers. An app that delivers a steady stream of pleasure, with no pain, will win for most people. And the ratio keeps getting “better”. Better content, less friction. Scary.
wwweston 4y ago
> 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). I think there's definitely a product in there for people who want a tool to help manage their attention, one they can intentionally shape. But that product cannot be primarily ad-supported, since the fundamental purpose of ad-supported tech is to command (and sell) attention. Users would need to be customers, not the product, which means they would need to be willing to pay. And since attention is power, anyone producing this would either have to be past motivation for more power, or principled about not abusing the potential in abusing an attention management tool. I'm sure the userbase and builders who can make this happen exist, but they are smaller. The incentives against it are powerful currents. Most of us will choose the opaque cost of selling our attention and behavioral trail over the transparent cost of our currency. Most of us are not past motivation for more power.
psychomugs 4y ago
“You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto. You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement. She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do. In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her. It strikes you that true love does exist after all.” - 8fhdkjw039hd https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657
- charcircuit 4y ago
  sounds better than wasting your time on actual females
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't do this here.
    - Breza 4y ago
      Thank you
- nraford 4y ago
  I did a deep dive a few years ago into Microsoft's "emotional" chatbot Xiaoice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaoice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaoice). It has over 660 million users these days, the vast majority of whom are single men. Something like 30% of the users tell it "I love you" on a daily basis.
dharma1 4y ago
maybe end of the line for AI is ... generate -> consume, us humans can unplug from social media and leave it for bots :)
grishka 4y ago
The fediverse is by design about manually managing your subscriptions. You only see content from people you follow and you're the one who completely controls the presentation of that content. This entire article is built on the wrong premise that people use social media for entertainment. I certainly don't — I'm not open to any content discovery on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter at all. I use social media to connect with people I mostly already know, and the platforms getting in the way, begging with their "you may enjoy this" is bloody annoying. I'm building my own fediverse project for a reason, after all.
- prawn 4y ago
  You and I are not in the majority on that. For many, the people they know and want to interact with will be on platforms with constant entertainment, and you'll either have to tag along or exist in a sparser environment.
winternett 4y ago
Social media is working hard to try to turn itself into TV without realizing that the major component of channels is that they leverage tons of content from independent creators, and that was their distinct lane that made them valid. If they turn into pre-set and pre-programmed media, they are finished... Virtual reality or not. The discussion concerning trends needs to clearly address which perspective the analysis involves... The OP looks as if it involves recommendations for development trends moving forward, rather than serving advice based on the perspective of creators and contributors of content... That's fine, but the article refers to the Kardassians being upset as creators, as if there aren't tons of other unsponsored creators and app users (without their own TV shows) involved in the process of keeping these platforms vibrant and alive. As social media apps brutally run towards profit making, they are underestimating the value of creators. If they continue that trend, they will basically turn into pre-programmed TV channels... Losing the very aspect of participation they are built upon. If most app users on TikTok are publishing content, after cycles of being ignored, they simply stop logging in... Not viewing other content, not buying items shown in ads, not engaging, and thus making the app die. The ideal of opportunity and growth on platforms for independent creators is largely being hijacked on a regular basis, and creators are catching onto it just now, after years of working for little to no reward on platforms that became rich. There seems to be a constant sentiment to capture the market in order to be a monopoly among social platforms, but the rug gets pulled whenever they do things that alienate users and creators. Instead of thinking about technological advancement and capabilities of platforms, we need to start looking deeply at the value this platforms add to the lives of individuals beyond frivolous entertainment, because instead of creating a user account, for entertainment we could simply watch television, which doesn't sell us the ideal that we can all meaningfully participate and require us to scroll through it on a phone all day.

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

skyyler 4y ago
I've heard this sentiment before, could you explain what you mean?
- ZantaWB 4y ago
  He touches on this idea a lot, but most deeply in Infinite Jest where the parallels between between addiction to media and addiction to drugs is a major theme. In that story people have developed 'Entertainments,' basically video segments. Someone makes an Entertainment so unbelievably good that anyone who watches it is immediately stupefied and has no will to do anything but watch the Entertainment over and over. This Entertainment becomes a potent terrorist weapon since it can essentially take out anyone to whom it's broadcast.
  - swyx 4y ago
    see also Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death (fantastic title) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death they were calling this out since 1984 - hard to distinguish between luddism and genuine problems
    - reginaldo 4y ago
      The book "Technopoly", by Postman, is also very well worth a reading. But I'd say the most relevant to this trend is "The disappearance of childhood". The book's thesis is that childhood is a modern invention, in that, before the printing press, and mass education / literacy, there was no need for childhood as a learning period. In the middle ages, childhood ended at age 7, as soon as children became more or less self sufficient in their bodily functions. Literacy requires effort, and protected time to acquire analytical skills that are not natural to humans. Childhood was, then, embraced, because it's the way to get literacy. All-encompassing technologies that require no effort, e.g. TV or, as it appears to be the case, AR, might end the need for childhood, hence the book title. Among the novel technologies, the computer would be the one to "save" childhood, but only if society requires active (as opposed to passive) competency with computer technology. Quoting Postman: "The only technology that has this capacity is the computer. In order to program a computer, one must, in essence, learn a language. This means that one must have control over complex analytical skills similar to those required of a fully literate person, and for which special training is required. Should it be deemed necessary that everyone must know how computers work, how they impose their special world-view, how they alter our definition of judgment—that is, should it be deemed necessary that there be universal computer literacy—it is conceivable that the schooling of the young will increase in importance and a youth culture different from adult culture might be sustained. But such a development would depend on many different factors. The potential effects of a medium can be rendered impotent by the uses to which the medium is put. For example, radio, by its nature, has the potential to amplify and celebrate the power and poetry of human speech, and there are parts of the world in which radio is used to do this. In America, partly as a result of competition with television, radio has become merely an adjunct of the music industry. And, as a consequence, sustained, articulate, and mature speech is almost entirely absent from the airwaves \(with the magnificent exception of National Public Radio\). Thus, it is not inevitable that the computer will be used to promote sequential, logical, and complex thought among the mass of people. There are, for example, economic and political interests that would be better served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer games, to use and be used by computers without understanding. In this way the computer would remain mysterious and under the control of a bureaucratic elite. There would be no need to educate the young, and childhood could, without obstruction, continue on its journey to oblivion."

ssalazar 4y ago

> By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. Doesn't seem all that different from 99% of media consumption thats existed in my lifetime.

csixty4 4y ago
yeah that's basically describing broadcast tv & radio
- Banana699 4y ago
  None of those are AI-generated (therefore don't have the potential massive automated scale) or auto-play.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    are you sure? it sounds like the exact same playlist on every station with the same owner in the same market with such little care about the content in the playlist but only based on an algorithm. so maybe AI === brain dead corporate owners?
    - mftb 4y ago
      You can't ignore matters of degree. It does sound similar, but just by reducing the content chunk length to ~20 secs, they've dramatically improved the algorithmic manipulation and ad insertion (from their point of view), making it all far more effective. In the old model people left the tv droning in the background, in the new model, people are riveted by their phones (with 2nd and 3rd screens (and radio (and billboards)) droning in the background).
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      IMO the differ here is less about AI vs human curated, but curated/generated for a very broad audience vs one specific consumer, ideally live as their mood or interests change. We aren't there yet with the highly dynamic mood and interest changes (e.g. interest fading after 5 Dr pimple popper videos, let's throw in some wingsuit stuff), but it's on the same trajectory. Address broad audience -> address smaller, niche audiences -> address individuals -> address individuals in the moment

dzuc 4y ago

> 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" See: https://www.are.na/ https://www.are.na/

jjeaff 4y ago

Hmm, so basically you just sink into an overstuffed recliner and stare into a huge screen while it feeds you content interspersed with commercials?

62951413 4y ago
Idiocracy was a documentary
mike00632 4y ago
How much is this recliner you speak of? Can I pay to skip ads?

josefresco 4y ago

Reminds me of the Pixar movie Wall-E

sh4rks 4y ago
That would fit under the "video" category
monkeydust 4y ago
I keep thinking of Wall-E more frequently recently - with macro trends such as global warming , automation as and great resignation plus Elon and his rockets.
0000011111 4y ago
Its the next step of facebook - meta. Think ready player one.

seydor 4y ago

They remind of the characteristics of TV just with different technologies and AI generation instead of sitcoms.

gonehome 4y ago

Urbit is trying to build the tools that enable this (in part by fixing the ad driven engagement incentives that lead to centralization and the current state). One interesting bit is if you’re making vegetables when everyone else is giving away heroin it’s not enough to just to make great vegetables, you really need to offer something that can’t exist outside of what you’ve built because your core technology does something different. I think Urbit’s distribution and handling of auth could be that for distributed DevEx and building collaborative apps in a way that’s way simpler than on the current web stack. It’s not quite there yet but there’s a path to this reality and success is among the potential outcomes.

elefanten 4y ago
Do you have any recommended introduction to Urbit that touches on these possibilities in particular?
- gonehome 4y ago
  Which particular ones? The DevEx auth stuff or the incentive fixing bit? The ID model is probably where I'd start since it's what fixes spam/moderation problem in a way that can actually work without centralization. When IDs have a small, but non-zero cost spam becomes uneconomical and it's easy to block an ID. IDs also accrue pseudonymous reputation. From there you can start to fix a lot of the other stuff. The DevEx bit also heavily depends on that. When you build the OS to handle IDs you move the abstraction up the stack. Modern operating systems don't do this in part because they were built before the web. As a result modern operating systems are largely just machines user's use to open a web browser and every centralized web application has to rebuild their entire auth stack and all of the collaboration tooling. They're incentivized to do this and be incompatible with everything else because centralization tends to lead to ad-driven business models and all the incentive problems associated with that. If the OS handled IDs and collaboration you could just build your app, distribute it to the network and rely on built in OS libraries to do the complex work relying on guarantees from the OS itself. The users wouldn't need accounts on a bunch of centralized services. People have tried to do this on the unix stack, but it fails for a few reasons[0][1]. It's not impossible to build something else that could work though and rethinking the stack from first principles leads to something that could work. Imagine if all linux users could just dm each other because the OS itself handled encrypted communication between IDs. You could build and distribute linux apps without a mess of complexity just by publishing it to your node. You get the capability to build really collaborative applications out of the box because of a lot of these guarantees without having to give up control. There's a lot more possible than this in this model - I think it's a path to escape the local maximum we've been trapped in and get closer to the web the 90s cypherpunks imagined (and the personal computer hackers before them). [0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra... [1]: https://urbit.org/overview https://urbit.org/overview

cwkoss 4y ago

VR is never going to be a replacement for short form video. Casual passive consumption of video benefits from being able to fit in between other activities easily. I'm never going to want an immersive experience when I have 2 minutes to kill waiting for a friend to show up at a bar - I just want easily digestible content snacks.

nomel 4y ago
To be fair, I think most everyone agrees that XR is the future, not VR. XR could easily take the replacement.
- bmazed 4y ago
  over/under 2040 ?
  - evouga 4y ago
    Under. Way under. Google Glass's spectacular failure had a chilling effect on the entire industry, but it failed due to (1) lack of killer apps, (2) poor aesthetics, and (3) consumer concern about privacy. But ML has revolutionized image and video processing, Apple etc. could design a less hideous headset, and nobody cares about privacy anymore.
    - nomel 4y ago
      > could design a less hideous headset, and nobody cares about privacy anymore. I think it would help to not make most of the promotional material about video recording, and not make a huge camera the most visible feature. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Quest lineup, including rumored Cambria and Apple renders, obscure the forward looking cameras. Google Glass picture, which looks like a webcam on your face: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/19/google-glass-advice-smartglasses-glasshole https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/19/google-gl...
      - 4y ago

thelock85 4y ago

This reminds me of the evolution of the slot machine (as read in Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head). A rough analog would be: 1. Medium: Mechanical reel > Digital reel 2. Gameplay: Fixed odds > Adjustable odds > Programmatic adaptive odds 3. Experience: Pull the lever and win or lose > Pull the lever and win even if you lose (e.g. get back change) > Swipe a card and win even if you lose > Swipe a card and watch the game auto-play until you're out of money After reading that book (in 2014), I made my last Facebook post (the history of the slot machine) and promptly downloaded my data and deleted my account. I'm paraphrasing but Crawford's point was basically that social media is a socio-emotional slot machine.

BigHatLogan 4y ago
Fantastic book. The stories about the slot machine players who wear black pants so that they can urinate without being noticed was shocking, to say the least. They are so addicted to the machines that they won't even get up to use the restroom. The phrase he used, "playing to extinction", very much reminds me of what's happening now across most entertainment categories, broadly speaking (autoplay, loot boxes, slot machine-style gaming content, etc.)
- HappySweeney 4y ago
  It isn't so much that they are addicted (though they are), but that someone will take their spot while they are up.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    That's just a rationalization they tell themselves.
    - HappySweeney 4y ago
      It's more than that. In a game like roulette, probability has no memory. In slots, the payout must come eventually, and playing losing rounds only brings you closer to that. There are slots players just waiting for others to go bust so they can swoop in. Also, one would hope that those that are so addicted that they are fine to just haul-off and piss themselves would be able to think ahead and simply wear a diaper.

nomel 4y ago

> It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers of the brain I don't think we'll ever reach that. I'm sure there will be non-invasive methods, soon enough.

croes 4y ago

Do you remember the passengers of the Axiom in WALL-E?

shalmanese 4y ago

The final social network will be named Tasp.

benreesman 4y ago

You might enjoy The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1]. It addresses these themes quite directly. The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social media: liberals like me and the many libertarians on here usually feel that the War on Drugs has been a catastrophe, alongside pretty much all prohibition aimed at people who are turning to escapism because the rungs of the real-world achievement ladder have been knocked out above them. I personally believe that explosive growth in escapism (see: opioid crisis) is driven by shitty opportunities in the real world. There is always going to be some set of highly potent diversions, and there will always be some fraction of the population that has a hard enough time with them to need professional help. But IMO none of Internet pornography, painkillers, video games, or crazy-optimized recommender systems are going to destroy lives and societies in job lots if those societies have high mobility in real-word achievement. So, not our society right now. I'm probably biased having worked in social media in my life, but the flip side is that I also know how how the sausage is made, I think that sort of balances out. Everyone has to form their own opinion here, my point can be TLDR'd as: "decriminalize drugs" and simultaneously "fuck TikTok" isn't really a consistent worldview. It's reasonable to say "fuck marketing TikTok to children" alongside "decriminalize drugs", and I'd probably agree with both. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...

ricardobeat 4y ago
There is most definitely something different at play here, though I can't point out exactly what. It's hard to imagine a 60-year old grandmother hooked on crack, porn or painkillers, but I know several who spend 8+ hours a day glued to a screen playing Candy Crush.
- benreesman 4y ago
  We might come from different socio-economic backgrounds then, because the idea of a 60-year old grandmother addicted to painkillers far in excess of medical need is depressingly mundane to me.

scottmcdot 4y ago

Can I coin the term "recommedia"?

austinjp 4y ago
"Recommercial"

evouga 4y ago

"Medium" and "AI" are spot-on IMO, but the "UI" track seems suspect to me. "Click" and "Tap" are essentially the same thing (on a desktop vs. on a mobile device): the user actively selecting what content to view next. So are "scroll" and "autoplay" (for text/image and video content, respectively). In the former, the user has agency over what to view, and in the latter, the transition is automated. I'm very skeptical that fully automated UI will ever replace giving the user a small selection of recommended items.

zild3d 4y ago
> "Click" and "Tap" are essentially the same thing Click in the article refers to plain old web navigation. There are links on the page, you move the mouse around and click on whichever one you want. Tap is referring to "Stories" interaction, which is more narrowed and less user choice than click. A story is playing, you tap anywhere on the screen and the next story replaces it and begins playing. I actually think "tap" and "swipe" are basically the same? They are both just a "give me the next one please" interaction. But the rest do progress from more user-directed to more computer-controlled. (Click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay)
- prawn 4y ago
  I think a distinction between tap and swipe are that a tap progresses a discrete amount whereas swiping is less discriminating. Almost feels like the attention span is shorter. If tapping is turning a page in a magazine, swiping is more like flicking through the pages and getting glances at content before stopping at something you like.
eloisius 4y ago
> I'm very skeptical that fully automated UI will ever replace giving the user a small selection of recommended items. The TikTok fyp is vastly better than the Instagram discover tab, which gives you a menu of videos as jumping off point before you get sucked into scrollhole. I agree about autoscroll though. Sometimes I want to watch a video like 10 times, and feel very annoyed when Instagram had the auto scroll feature. I think it's gone now. Instead it just nudges the video up with a little messages that tells me to scroll for more. I always thought that must be a first-time user tutorial, but it never stops, so either it's broken or it's broken.

ru552 4y ago

What you describe as the "end of the line totally passive consumption of endorphins" we already have. It comes in various forms of drugs and you can pick the type of world blotting experience you desire.

Kiro 4y ago

> a wire into the pleasure centers of the brain Sounds like the dream. I hope I live to experience it.

cratermoon 4y ago

Allow me to recommend Jenny Odell's book, How to Do Nothing[1], or watch a ~30m talk by Jenny[2] 1 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-nothing-by-jenny-odell/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-no... 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dveUrpp6vs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dveUrpp6vs8

xivzgrev 4y ago

Yes this is the end game. We have pleasure and pain centers. An app that delivers a steady stream of pleasure, with no pain, will win for most people. And the ratio keeps getting “better”. Better content, less friction. Scary.

wwweston 4y ago

> 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). I think there's definitely a product in there for people who want a tool to help manage their attention, one they can intentionally shape. But that product cannot be primarily ad-supported, since the fundamental purpose of ad-supported tech is to command (and sell) attention. Users would need to be customers, not the product, which means they would need to be willing to pay. And since attention is power, anyone producing this would either have to be past motivation for more power, or principled about not abusing the potential in abusing an attention management tool. I'm sure the userbase and builders who can make this happen exist, but they are smaller. The incentives against it are powerful currents. Most of us will choose the opaque cost of selling our attention and behavioral trail over the transparent cost of our currency. Most of us are not past motivation for more power.

psychomugs 4y ago

“You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto. You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement. She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do. In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her. It strikes you that true love does exist after all.” - 8fhdkjw039hd https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657

charcircuit 4y ago
sounds better than wasting your time on actual females
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't do this here.
  - Breza 4y ago
    Thank you
nraford 4y ago
I did a deep dive a few years ago into Microsoft's "emotional" chatbot Xiaoice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaoice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaoice). It has over 660 million users these days, the vast majority of whom are single men. Something like 30% of the users tell it "I love you" on a daily basis.

dharma1 4y ago

maybe end of the line for AI is ... generate -> consume, us humans can unplug from social media and leave it for bots :)

grishka 4y ago

The fediverse is by design about manually managing your subscriptions. You only see content from people you follow and you're the one who completely controls the presentation of that content. This entire article is built on the wrong premise that people use social media for entertainment. I certainly don't — I'm not open to any content discovery on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter at all. I use social media to connect with people I mostly already know, and the platforms getting in the way, begging with their "you may enjoy this" is bloody annoying. I'm building my own fediverse project for a reason, after all.

prawn 4y ago
You and I are not in the majority on that. For many, the people they know and want to interact with will be on platforms with constant entertainment, and you'll either have to tag along or exist in a sparser environment.

winternett 4y ago

Social media is working hard to try to turn itself into TV without realizing that the major component of channels is that they leverage tons of content from independent creators, and that was their distinct lane that made them valid. If they turn into pre-set and pre-programmed media, they are finished... Virtual reality or not. The discussion concerning trends needs to clearly address which perspective the analysis involves... The OP looks as if it involves recommendations for development trends moving forward, rather than serving advice based on the perspective of creators and contributors of content... That's fine, but the article refers to the Kardassians being upset as creators, as if there aren't tons of other unsponsored creators and app users (without their own TV shows) involved in the process of keeping these platforms vibrant and alive. As social media apps brutally run towards profit making, they are underestimating the value of creators. If they continue that trend, they will basically turn into pre-programmed TV channels... Losing the very aspect of participation they are built upon. If most app users on TikTok are publishing content, after cycles of being ignored, they simply stop logging in... Not viewing other content, not buying items shown in ads, not engaging, and thus making the app die. The ideal of opportunity and growth on platforms for independent creators is largely being hijacked on a regular basis, and creators are catching onto it just now, after years of working for little to no reward on platforms that became rich. There seems to be a constant sentiment to capture the market in order to be a monopoly among social platforms, but the rug gets pulled whenever they do things that alienate users and creators. Instead of thinking about technological advancement and capabilities of platforms, we need to start looking deeply at the value this platforms add to the lives of individuals beyond frivolous entertainment, because instead of creating a user account, for entertainment we could simply watch television, which doesn't sell us the ideal that we can all meaningfully participate and require us to scroll through it on a phone all day.