5 ms·
I hate it. I believe it comes down to the fact that most things are optimised for different things than what you use or want it for. i.e the best social netwo
by ChildOfChaos 4y ago
I hate it.
I believe it comes down to the fact that most things are optimised for different things than what you use or want it for.
i.e the best social network would connect you to the world, let you see what was important and give you that as easily and quickly as possible so you can spend as much of your life enjoying actual life and less using the tool, however it's ad supported and there goal is to keep you on it as much as possible, so they have to give you a little of what you want, so they can get as much of what they want as possible.
And it's the same as anything, you want news, you want to be informed, they want clicks and page views, most news it could be enough to just read the headline, but they have to put it in a clickbait way and then burry the important sentence within a huge article of adverts, what's worse is that sentence wasn't even that relevant when you actually found it.
Youtube should be great for content, but it becomes a business and 'content creators' are't really producing that valuable content, they are producing content that feeds the algorithm and grows there subscribers, there can be some value in it but the value is massively diluted by any major content creator to fit in with the rules.
It's annoying and I haven't found a solution. It feels like a losing battle.
- syl_sau 4y agoYes, there's in fact an incentive mismatch here between the creator and the media. But it doesn't mean it wasn't there before to some extent. There are still great resources out there. So how do you spot them? Information does not come easy, and never has. If it's easy, you most likely won't remember it, which essentially makes the whole thing a loss of time. What I would aim for is focus. This is the big difference I think. If the content is selected for its quality, I'm in. And quality almost always mean quantity. Learning takes time and reflection. If you don't do either of these you're just consuming things on a surface level. Replace Twitter with internet forums, replace articles with books, instructional videos with real documentaries, etc. All these things call for your full attention, and that is, I believe, the most important. Paradoxically, I've found that the best "content producers" instinctively know this and don't spend much time on YT/social media.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoTo be fair, I think the signal to noise ratio of your local branch library is a lot higher than what you’d find digitally these days
- mansoon 4y agoYeah but turn your signal producer into one that has less noise and find out that the world is noisy and entropy wins in the end and that people are just other systems inside the system and all of it has it's own goals. And so why bother? Embrace correlation, seed the world with noise, burn yourself up as you and all of it burns down and we wait for the telomeres to do the inevitable.
- SyzygistSix 4y agoTrue but there is less signal available. It was much more effort and time consuming to learn. Now the effort is spent in filtering out the noise but it still seems like a net gain. Things like learning to cook or fix a bicycle, or find books and music are so much easier, despite the overwhelming amount of garbage/noise. At least that's my take as an adult who has lived in both worlds.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _a_a_a_ 4y agoIf you paid for that it would be. There's your solution.
- jrussino 4y agoPersonally, I'd be glad to pay to "fix" this but it doesn't seem to be an option. I pay for YouTube premium, for example, so that I and my kids (especially) aren't constantly bombarded by ads. Taking that option doesn't change the fundamental nature of the ad-based ecosystem/algorithm though. And I still get in-content plugs for SquareSpace, BetterHelp, Athletic Greens, etc, etc, etc...
- q-base 4y agoI think that this is a good summary of the problem. The incentives seems misaligned. And I am not sure that paying for content would magically make this disappear. Or if so, then the companies should offer completely different products to paying customers, not just ad-free experiences.
- dingusdew 4y ago[dead]
- 8bitsrule 4y agoThere's a dilemma. If the news sources knew what your preferences were, and you'd somehow pay the cost of filtering the news, then they could ship you just what you wanted. No more stories about mishaps across-the-ocean, or on topics that disinterest or rankle you, or from agencies you don't trust or want to support. OTOH, who wants their detailed preferences out in the wild? Clearly a tailored model is better; how can that be implemented, in a way that doesn't filter out what you do want to hear about? Seems like the filtering should happen at the client end. Are there ways to do that? (EG I might temporarily want to follow something for a week. Then not.) But: what's the incentive for the sources to feed your filters?
- amelius 4y agoIf only HN had some collaborative filtering to present me only the stuff I need to know about ...