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>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And

>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale. It's valuable precisely because it takes a lot of time, energy, and luck to establish. You want authenticity? Go find community in meatspace. You want authenticity online? Talk to those meatspace friends in private group chats.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
There may be exceptions ( MMO guilds may be an examle ), where it is not meatspace, but authenticity may be higher.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  Some of those do have RL meetings, such as BlizzCon. Or they're comprised of RL friends.
- izzydata 3y ago
  I wonder if the newer generation of gamers can form connections from MMO style guilds like the past generation of gamers did. Everything that I've seen from young gamers today suggests that their motivations for playing games is quite different. Playing just for the sake of playing and socializing on a personal level is not part of it. I get the impression it is about being seen doing things. If nobody sees you do something it basically never happened. The more people that see you do something the more important it is to them.
Enginerrrd 3y ago
I think the ugly truth of it is, just like there's a noticeable difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart (because of the annual fee at costco), there's just some people that are going to have an undesirable influence on your community. The temptation to try and rope in those extra users is often irresistible but to get them you have to tank your content to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Very few growth minded companies or content creators have escaped that trap. It requires prioritizing your principles and long-term outlook over short-term growth which is so antithetical to the typical silicon valley situation trying to tap into and keep the spigot of VC money flowing.
- pif 3y ago
  > difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart Could someone please explain to me what is implied here? I've been to the USA only once, and I didn't visit neither a Costco nor a Walmart. The only difference I could point to between them, is that no "Costco people" phenomenon exists on YouTube. Sincere thanks in advance!
  - Nuthen 3y ago
    Costco requires a yearly membership, so I think they are implying that the incentive is different. Costco has a strong incentive for you to leave with a decent time there, and feeling like you got a good deal (mostly through buying items in bulk) so you'll continue to renew your membership year after year. At Walmart they might organize the store to get you to buy candy at the checkout line, or have a lot of less-than-healty options to tempt you near the essentials, to maximize the profit in that way. Because you're not shopping at Walmart because you want to be. Disclaimer: I haven't been to Costco at a long time. And they still try to get you in their own way with free samples you can find all over the store.
  - jtr1 3y ago
    They are implying that Costco's yearly membership fee filters out poor people, who shop at Walmart instead. They consider these people to be undesirable customers because people with money do not like to associate with them.
    - jjoonathan 3y ago
      It's not the fee so much as the focus on bulk that selects for big fridges/pantries/houses/cars/families.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Costco shopper here who likes shopping at Dollar General and Aldi. Hell, even Dollar Tree and such. It's not just that they're poor. There's something about wal mart.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
antupis 3y ago
I think it is more about if you want go after general market you need to be bland that is why regular cars and clothes from HM look a same or biggest fast food chains menus look somewhat same.
hnreport 3y ago
You win the internet for today. human connection doesn't scale Before they tried to figure out why certain schools were always failing (curriculum, etc), they honed in on another very simple cause. Overcrowded classrooms. Soon as you go from 18 kids per room, to 28, you’re in trouble. The internet didn’t become any more or less of anything. It just scaled the base initial value of numofHumansInvolved to 8 billion. But’s the only thing that scaled, that number. It’s like scaling water pipes out throughout the city without scaling filtering system also. You are still basically circulating dirty water.
k1ns 3y ago
I think it's less to do with the internet and more to do with celebrity. Magazines push relatability and authenticity for a reason. We have to feel like they're relatable or their influence dissipates.
jklinger410 3y ago
> as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse. People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common. The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to what they all have in common, it becomes very surface level. Therefore all things that want to get mass approval must be very basic, vague, and shallow. This is the capitalist way of creating content. Conversely, when real artists struck chords with large groups of people, it was because they stumbled upon something unique that many people shared. This unique thing was then valued by large groups of people, and became culture. Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it. Art must always start that way, or else it is simply content. //EDIT I also want to add that this is not a new thing and it's root cause is not social media. It is any media that is shared, whose goal is a large number of eyeballs. This has happened with every medium and will continue to happen forever. If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it. Capitalism is just people making agreements with each other in a legal framework. It 100% does not preclude charitable work, volunteerism, or art. It also doesn't value anything; it's a system where, as much as possible, people can do what they want and pay for things they deem to be valuable. > If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies. This is true. Pain creates wonderful art.
  - jihiggins 3y ago
    i would argue that capitalism implicitly values... capital? just as socialism values... society also, you're conflating markets with capitalism
skmurphy 3y ago
"Human connection does not scale" is succinctly expressed insight. You identify the follow on implications and what can be done to preserve it. Thank you.
sebastos 3y ago
Authenticity online USED to come somewhat naturally by virtue of just... starting communities. The reason was that the web was small, and discovery process was more random - that is, less systematic. As a consequence, you almost couldn't help but start forums or blogs or content platforms with hundreds to low thousands of participants. And because those communities were smaller, you were that much more engaged. You recognized the names of the people posting, and understood their brand. So online authenticity used to exist without having to merely import meatspace directly. But the interesting thing is that there's still nothing that makes it fundamentally impossible to start a relatively small forum nowadays. And there are plenty of those small communities that still exist! And yet... somehow, that's just not good enough, is it? We are all still constantly complaining about the attention economy and the performative nature of online communication. So what gives? To me, what this says is that it's not good enough for small-band, high authenticity communication to exist. It also needs to be true that broadband, inauthentic communication NOT exist. The simple truth, I think, is that it annoys us when things we don't like manage to capture lots of attention. When you see something you disagree with gathering momentum, it _grates_. There is something fundamental about that; "get over it" isn't going to solve this. You saw this happen with Reddit: slowly, the most popular subreddits became bigger and bigger cesspits. People always suggested that the way around this was to just ignore the popular stuff and find smaller subreddits to enjoy. But it just never resonated with people as a solution. Ignoring the popular subreddits as a lost cause feels like putting your head in the sand. Don't bother trying to explain to me that you can't fix discourse all by yourself, or that there's no sense in sweating what the front page of reddit looks like. You're not arguing with me! You're arguing with the millions of people's inner id, who see that front page and twitch a little bit. I think this might speak to some human need to assert our own view of the world and reject untruths that we've already ourselves debunked. When you see somebody pronouncing an old thing you _used_ to believe, your impulse is to warn that person "oh no, I can see why you'd think that, but it's actually more complicated than that for reasons x, y and z." But imagine that you see somebody drowning in falsity and before you can reach them to disabuse them of their misapprehension, thousands and thousands of people crowd around them, agreeing and cheering! And then, before you can push through the crowd and take the podium, they all disperse into the void. You can't call them all back and explain that they just walked away with the wrong information... they're just.. gone. Gone, carrying the virus of bad ideas out into the aether, now sure to awaken somewhere else, like wack-a-mole. Something about human nature finds this situation insufferable. But the twittersphere is perfectly designed to make it _the only way we communicate_! To bring it home, I think our need to right wrongs is what doesn't scale. We can't all convince everybody of our own world view, but globally networked, systematically visible communication baits us into doing exactly that. Once pandora's box is opened, we can't ignore the temptation to participate, nor can we ignore the constant insult of participating.
kraig911 3y ago
All i can say to this comment is 'lol meat space' I think we should use this principle in more places than talking about twitter. There's just so much nuance of people interacting we take for granted.
aeturnum 3y ago
Human connection doesn't scale! But authenticity isn't connection. You do not need to connect with someone to see their authenticity. I think the original sin of Elon-Twitter is mistaking popularity for authenticity - because by definition authenticity isn't universally recognizable. It's how authentic experience is unexpected, arbitrary, incomplete and often contradictory. People being authentic in a world you're not familiar with looks like...nothing? Often? When The Bear came out it showed the characters drinking out of plastic 'to-go' containers because there's no glass allowed in most commercial kitchens[1]. It had the smell of authenticity - but you wouldn't see it if you didn't know what was authentic already. Authenticity is just not a "universally recognizable" thing. At the 'whole system' level, if you want to promote it, you should be afraid of nearly universally loved content. That content is usually too 'cooked' to really be authentic. You want the less complete stuff. [1] https://twitter.com/dillllllo/status/1557562291801006081 https://twitter.com/dillllllo/status/1557562291801006081
- Kye 3y ago
  This is something I've noticed with documentaries on the furry community. Outsider documentaries always focus on the fursuits. You almost never see someone out of one even though most furries don't own one. Pittsburgh's news outlets always do interview segments during Anthrocon, and it's always fursuiters in suit. And then from the inside, you get stuff like The Fandom which goes into the real human stories behind the animals rather than gawking at the rarest but most visible aspect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY It's authentic. Someone on the outside would probably recognize the difference (someone doing just another documentary/interview vs someone pointing a camera at her own community), but might not recognize the outside view as inauthentic.
  - aeturnum 3y ago
    This is another wonderful example! There's an aspect of...how any complex trend will inevitably have some aspects that would appear to outsides like they were included by mistake...but insiders will assure you are essential and typical. You need insiders to guide you because, as outsiders, you can't understand.
random3 3y ago
IMO it's bit ironic that people seek maximum diversity within a single platform without taking into account the effort to seek the diversity beyond that platform. There are online communities beyond X and, event within X you can just choose to track select groups you follow and constantly unfollow what you don't like.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  I have few ideas. Why can't people create their own filter bubbles? Lists do that in some sense. How about "For You" tab but for a particular List so that recommendations expand and let me get the feel of that particular List's filter bubble. Why can't I choose to browse Twitter as it appears to a particular category of people e.g. say a mathematician or neuroscientist? Twitter is all public, there is no fear of de-anonymizing anyone if Twitter decides to implement such a feature.
  - random3 3y ago
    I have a similar line of thinking. However I think it applies generally and that any "broker" (e.g. Amazon) that is not explicitely on your side will be in conflict of interest. The implications are actually deep and wide.
- hightrix 3y ago
  > There are online communities beyond X As an aside, I find this phrase funny today. In the past, I would have known you are using the term 'X' to be a generic reference to online communities. Today, I don't know if you are talking specifically about twitter or just a generic online community.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  People don't seek maximum diversity. People seek the exact diversity of a small sample of the world they tolerate. The people that say they do are just unaware of all the diversity they reject.
  - random3 3y ago
w10-1 3y ago
fyi, I can't get used to the term me*space. I can hardly type it. It articulates a level of contempt for humanity that can only be borne of complete dissociation or deep hatred. I know that's not how it's meant, but I really, really encourage people to avoid using the term. Strangely, I don't feel the same way when some wisdom traditions remind us that we are mortal (a bag of bones comes to mind), or in response to a number of other diminishing epithets. Weird.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I read it as sort of self-deprecating, a sort of acknowledgment that the speaker is so very online that they think of the physical world their body inhabits as something that explicitly needs to be called out. I think it is quite funny and want to encourage people to use the term.
- wierd-eye-loser 3y ago
  [dead]
- 0x4d464d48 3y ago
  I disagree. I find it humorous and endering. Meatspace, to me, is a term that encapsulates the authenticity of being a blood and bone human being and all of the foibles that come with it. Cyberspace, at least so far as social media is concerned, is a perpetual performance where what matters is how strangers feel about you and how they feel about you is often indepedant of what you actually do in meatspace. To me cyberspace shines with a much stronger contempt for humanity than meatspace. Meatspace simply demands you be the lump of meat that you are while cyberspace demands that you please a judgemental and often quarrelsome mob.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
When MySpace first started getting big I remember people talking about how many friends you could have on it. And I remember not understanding at all because these weren't friends and who the hell can handle having hundreds or thousands of friends? I never understood MySpace and in many ways I still don't understand Facebook (I do on a rational level but not an emotional one). I'd rather have 3-4 lifelong friends than thousands of online friends. And that doesn't mean you can't make real connections with people online, just that doing so takes years of effort just like offline friends, so doesn't scale, just like you said.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Following and being a leader, with status, from a far, is also a form human connection. Religions have already for centuries scaled that, mostly by being an idol & not getting personal. Whether that's a priest, or a Tibetan Lama, they normally don't mingle, they do this be not being "authentic" but by representing an idea or principle. That's what a lot social media "influecners" are trying to accomplish. And what personal branding attempts to do. Is it wanted? Probably not. But it's definitely somethng that connect to the human psyche.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
akkad33 3y ago
Do people actually say meatspace?
j45 3y ago
To me there’s a difference between better content and engaging content. Better content seeks quality connections that may scale so far. Engaging content seeks quantity of connections. Of course this could be further argued. Maybe the better and engagement is interpreted to mean too distribution in quantity focused. Edit:typo
- Kye 3y ago
  Blog posts remain a holdout on the relation between quality and connection count. In this link-wary modern web, every link counts.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Everyone is getting paid by the number of impressions - not the quality of them. With incentives like this..
  - j45 3y ago
    Depending on the platform it can be other things too. View time, remaining on platform, etc.
    - nullindividual 3y ago
      What [ad] platform pays on anything but clicks?
      - Kye 3y ago
        There's CPM (cost per mille [thousand]) and CPA (cost per action) too. Twitter has CPA ads: https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-a-followers-campaign.html https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-a... https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-an-engagements-campaign.html https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-a... https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-an-app-installs-campaign.html https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-a...
kogus 3y ago
I agree 100% with what you are saying, but I don't think you need a human connection to have good content. The encyclopedia Brittanica didn't establish a human connection, but it was a valuable resource. An ugly problem with an attention economy is that you are rewarded for seeming useful and interesting, but once the attention has been given, there is no incentive to actually deliver. So we get clickbait headlines and veneer-grade content because that's enough to get the ad dollars, without the investment that original content would require. To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life. The large-scale effect is decidedly negative, though.
- Retric 3y ago
  Reputation is still valuable over time. Some YouTube creators I ignore irregardless of the thumbnail, while other content creators get a click automatically. The same happens with websites and everywhere else in the attention economy.
  - oangemangut 3y ago
    some content creators I click on _despite_ them having to do the click-bait stupid YouTube thumbnails. As an aside - word you may have been looking for is irrespective, or perhaps just plain old regardless. irregardless is not a word.
    - function_seven 3y ago
      > irregardless is not a word. Lots of dictionaries disagree. But not me! I'll join you on this hill, regardless of what those dumb dictionaries say. The misuse of "literally" and the common use of "irregardless" are the red pills that have turned me into a crotchety old ... prescriptivist.
      - narcraft 3y ago
        People say that people use literally to mean figuratively now which is literally the opposite of literally, but I've literally never seen someone use literally to mean figuratively. I have often seen it used to hyperbolize the strength of analogies or generalizations, which means they apply literally somewhat figuratively, but that doesn't mean that they literally mean for literally to mean figuratively.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

There may be exceptions ( MMO guilds may be an examle ), where it is not meatspace, but authenticity may be higher.

Fnoord 3y ago
Some of those do have RL meetings, such as BlizzCon. Or they're comprised of RL friends.
izzydata 3y ago
I wonder if the newer generation of gamers can form connections from MMO style guilds like the past generation of gamers did. Everything that I've seen from young gamers today suggests that their motivations for playing games is quite different. Playing just for the sake of playing and socializing on a personal level is not part of it. I get the impression it is about being seen doing things. If nobody sees you do something it basically never happened. The more people that see you do something the more important it is to them.

Enginerrrd 3y ago

I think the ugly truth of it is, just like there's a noticeable difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart (because of the annual fee at costco), there's just some people that are going to have an undesirable influence on your community. The temptation to try and rope in those extra users is often irresistible but to get them you have to tank your content to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Very few growth minded companies or content creators have escaped that trap. It requires prioritizing your principles and long-term outlook over short-term growth which is so antithetical to the typical silicon valley situation trying to tap into and keep the spigot of VC money flowing.

pif 3y ago
> difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart Could someone please explain to me what is implied here? I've been to the USA only once, and I didn't visit neither a Costco nor a Walmart. The only difference I could point to between them, is that no "Costco people" phenomenon exists on YouTube. Sincere thanks in advance!
- Nuthen 3y ago
  Costco requires a yearly membership, so I think they are implying that the incentive is different. Costco has a strong incentive for you to leave with a decent time there, and feeling like you got a good deal (mostly through buying items in bulk) so you'll continue to renew your membership year after year. At Walmart they might organize the store to get you to buy candy at the checkout line, or have a lot of less-than-healty options to tempt you near the essentials, to maximize the profit in that way. Because you're not shopping at Walmart because you want to be. Disclaimer: I haven't been to Costco at a long time. And they still try to get you in their own way with free samples you can find all over the store.
- jtr1 3y ago
  They are implying that Costco's yearly membership fee filters out poor people, who shop at Walmart instead. They consider these people to be undesirable customers because people with money do not like to associate with them.
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    It's not the fee so much as the focus on bulk that selects for big fridges/pantries/houses/cars/families.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Costco shopper here who likes shopping at Dollar General and Aldi. Hell, even Dollar Tree and such. It's not just that they're poor. There's something about wal mart.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

antupis 3y ago

I think it is more about if you want go after general market you need to be bland that is why regular cars and clothes from HM look a same or biggest fast food chains menus look somewhat same.

hnreport 3y ago

You win the internet for today. human connection doesn't scale Before they tried to figure out why certain schools were always failing (curriculum, etc), they honed in on another very simple cause. Overcrowded classrooms. Soon as you go from 18 kids per room, to 28, you’re in trouble. The internet didn’t become any more or less of anything. It just scaled the base initial value of numofHumansInvolved to 8 billion. But’s the only thing that scaled, that number. It’s like scaling water pipes out throughout the city without scaling filtering system also. You are still basically circulating dirty water.

k1ns 3y ago

I think it's less to do with the internet and more to do with celebrity. Magazines push relatability and authenticity for a reason. We have to feel like they're relatable or their influence dissipates.

jklinger410 3y ago

> as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse. People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common. The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to what they all have in common, it becomes very surface level. Therefore all things that want to get mass approval must be very basic, vague, and shallow. This is the capitalist way of creating content. Conversely, when real artists struck chords with large groups of people, it was because they stumbled upon something unique that many people shared. This unique thing was then valued by large groups of people, and became culture. Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it. Art must always start that way, or else it is simply content. //EDIT I also want to add that this is not a new thing and it's root cause is not social media. It is any media that is shared, whose goal is a large number of eyeballs. This has happened with every medium and will continue to happen forever. If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it. Capitalism is just people making agreements with each other in a legal framework. It 100% does not preclude charitable work, volunteerism, or art. It also doesn't value anything; it's a system where, as much as possible, people can do what they want and pay for things they deem to be valuable. > If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies. This is true. Pain creates wonderful art.
- jihiggins 3y ago
  i would argue that capitalism implicitly values... capital? just as socialism values... society also, you're conflating markets with capitalism

skmurphy 3y ago

"Human connection does not scale" is succinctly expressed insight. You identify the follow on implications and what can be done to preserve it. Thank you.

sebastos 3y ago

Authenticity online USED to come somewhat naturally by virtue of just... starting communities. The reason was that the web was small, and discovery process was more random - that is, less systematic. As a consequence, you almost couldn't help but start forums or blogs or content platforms with hundreds to low thousands of participants. And because those communities were smaller, you were that much more engaged. You recognized the names of the people posting, and understood their brand. So online authenticity used to exist without having to merely import meatspace directly. But the interesting thing is that there's still nothing that makes it fundamentally impossible to start a relatively small forum nowadays. And there are plenty of those small communities that still exist! And yet... somehow, that's just not good enough, is it? We are all still constantly complaining about the attention economy and the performative nature of online communication. So what gives? To me, what this says is that it's not good enough for small-band, high authenticity communication to exist. It also needs to be true that broadband, inauthentic communication NOT exist. The simple truth, I think, is that it annoys us when things we don't like manage to capture lots of attention. When you see something you disagree with gathering momentum, it _grates_. There is something fundamental about that; "get over it" isn't going to solve this. You saw this happen with Reddit: slowly, the most popular subreddits became bigger and bigger cesspits. People always suggested that the way around this was to just ignore the popular stuff and find smaller subreddits to enjoy. But it just never resonated with people as a solution. Ignoring the popular subreddits as a lost cause feels like putting your head in the sand. Don't bother trying to explain to me that you can't fix discourse all by yourself, or that there's no sense in sweating what the front page of reddit looks like. You're not arguing with me! You're arguing with the millions of people's inner id, who see that front page and twitch a little bit. I think this might speak to some human need to assert our own view of the world and reject untruths that we've already ourselves debunked. When you see somebody pronouncing an old thing you _used_ to believe, your impulse is to warn that person "oh no, I can see why you'd think that, but it's actually more complicated than that for reasons x, y and z." But imagine that you see somebody drowning in falsity and before you can reach them to disabuse them of their misapprehension, thousands and thousands of people crowd around them, agreeing and cheering! And then, before you can push through the crowd and take the podium, they all disperse into the void. You can't call them all back and explain that they just walked away with the wrong information... they're just.. gone. Gone, carrying the virus of bad ideas out into the aether, now sure to awaken somewhere else, like wack-a-mole. Something about human nature finds this situation insufferable. But the twittersphere is perfectly designed to make it _the only way we communicate_! To bring it home, I think our need to right wrongs is what doesn't scale. We can't all convince everybody of our own world view, but globally networked, systematically visible communication baits us into doing exactly that. Once pandora's box is opened, we can't ignore the temptation to participate, nor can we ignore the constant insult of participating.

kraig911 3y ago

All i can say to this comment is 'lol meat space' I think we should use this principle in more places than talking about twitter. There's just so much nuance of people interacting we take for granted.

aeturnum 3y ago

Human connection doesn't scale! But authenticity isn't connection. You do not need to connect with someone to see their authenticity. I think the original sin of Elon-Twitter is mistaking popularity for authenticity - because by definition authenticity isn't universally recognizable. It's how authentic experience is unexpected, arbitrary, incomplete and often contradictory. People being authentic in a world you're not familiar with looks like...nothing? Often? When The Bear came out it showed the characters drinking out of plastic 'to-go' containers because there's no glass allowed in most commercial kitchens[1]. It had the smell of authenticity - but you wouldn't see it if you didn't know what was authentic already. Authenticity is just not a "universally recognizable" thing. At the 'whole system' level, if you want to promote it, you should be afraid of nearly universally loved content. That content is usually too 'cooked' to really be authentic. You want the less complete stuff. [1] https://twitter.com/dillllllo/status/1557562291801006081 https://twitter.com/dillllllo/status/1557562291801006081

Kye 3y ago
This is something I've noticed with documentaries on the furry community. Outsider documentaries always focus on the fursuits. You almost never see someone out of one even though most furries don't own one. Pittsburgh's news outlets always do interview segments during Anthrocon, and it's always fursuiters in suit. And then from the inside, you get stuff like The Fandom which goes into the real human stories behind the animals rather than gawking at the rarest but most visible aspect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY It's authentic. Someone on the outside would probably recognize the difference (someone doing just another documentary/interview vs someone pointing a camera at her own community), but might not recognize the outside view as inauthentic.
- aeturnum 3y ago
  This is another wonderful example! There's an aspect of...how any complex trend will inevitably have some aspects that would appear to outsides like they were included by mistake...but insiders will assure you are essential and typical. You need insiders to guide you because, as outsiders, you can't understand.

random3 3y ago

IMO it's bit ironic that people seek maximum diversity within a single platform without taking into account the effort to seek the diversity beyond that platform. There are online communities beyond X and, event within X you can just choose to track select groups you follow and constantly unfollow what you don't like.

passion__desire 3y ago
I have few ideas. Why can't people create their own filter bubbles? Lists do that in some sense. How about "For You" tab but for a particular List so that recommendations expand and let me get the feel of that particular List's filter bubble. Why can't I choose to browse Twitter as it appears to a particular category of people e.g. say a mathematician or neuroscientist? Twitter is all public, there is no fear of de-anonymizing anyone if Twitter decides to implement such a feature.
- random3 3y ago
  I have a similar line of thinking. However I think it applies generally and that any "broker" (e.g. Amazon) that is not explicitely on your side will be in conflict of interest. The implications are actually deep and wide.
hightrix 3y ago
> There are online communities beyond X As an aside, I find this phrase funny today. In the past, I would have known you are using the term 'X' to be a generic reference to online communities. Today, I don't know if you are talking specifically about twitter or just a generic online community.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
People don't seek maximum diversity. People seek the exact diversity of a small sample of the world they tolerate. The people that say they do are just unaware of all the diversity they reject.
- random3 3y ago

w10-1 3y ago

fyi, I can't get used to the term me*space. I can hardly type it. It articulates a level of contempt for humanity that can only be borne of complete dissociation or deep hatred. I know that's not how it's meant, but I really, really encourage people to avoid using the term. Strangely, I don't feel the same way when some wisdom traditions remind us that we are mortal (a bag of bones comes to mind), or in response to a number of other diminishing epithets. Weird.

bee_rider 3y ago
I read it as sort of self-deprecating, a sort of acknowledgment that the speaker is so very online that they think of the physical world their body inhabits as something that explicitly needs to be called out. I think it is quite funny and want to encourage people to use the term.
wierd-eye-loser 3y ago
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0x4d464d48 3y ago
I disagree. I find it humorous and endering. Meatspace, to me, is a term that encapsulates the authenticity of being a blood and bone human being and all of the foibles that come with it. Cyberspace, at least so far as social media is concerned, is a perpetual performance where what matters is how strangers feel about you and how they feel about you is often indepedant of what you actually do in meatspace. To me cyberspace shines with a much stronger contempt for humanity than meatspace. Meatspace simply demands you be the lump of meat that you are while cyberspace demands that you please a judgemental and often quarrelsome mob.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

When MySpace first started getting big I remember people talking about how many friends you could have on it. And I remember not understanding at all because these weren't friends and who the hell can handle having hundreds or thousands of friends? I never understood MySpace and in many ways I still don't understand Facebook (I do on a rational level but not an emotional one). I'd rather have 3-4 lifelong friends than thousands of online friends. And that doesn't mean you can't make real connections with people online, just that doing so takes years of effort just like offline friends, so doesn't scale, just like you said.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

Following and being a leader, with status, from a far, is also a form human connection. Religions have already for centuries scaled that, mostly by being an idol & not getting personal. Whether that's a priest, or a Tibetan Lama, they normally don't mingle, they do this be not being "authentic" but by representing an idea or principle. That's what a lot social media "influecners" are trying to accomplish. And what personal branding attempts to do. Is it wanted? Probably not. But it's definitely somethng that connect to the human psyche.

deleted 3y ago

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akkad33 3y ago

Do people actually say meatspace?

j45 3y ago

To me there’s a difference between better content and engaging content. Better content seeks quality connections that may scale so far. Engaging content seeks quantity of connections. Of course this could be further argued. Maybe the better and engagement is interpreted to mean too distribution in quantity focused. Edit:typo

Kye 3y ago
Blog posts remain a holdout on the relation between quality and connection count. In this link-wary modern web, every link counts.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
Everyone is getting paid by the number of impressions - not the quality of them. With incentives like this..
- j45 3y ago
  Depending on the platform it can be other things too. View time, remaining on platform, etc.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    What [ad] platform pays on anything but clicks?
    - Kye 3y ago
      There's CPM (cost per mille [thousand]) and CPA (cost per action) too. Twitter has CPA ads: https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-a-followers-campaign.html https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-a... https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-an-engagements-campaign.html https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-a... https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-an-app-installs-campaign.html https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/create-a...

kogus 3y ago

I agree 100% with what you are saying, but I don't think you need a human connection to have good content. The encyclopedia Brittanica didn't establish a human connection, but it was a valuable resource. An ugly problem with an attention economy is that you are rewarded for seeming useful and interesting, but once the attention has been given, there is no incentive to actually deliver. So we get clickbait headlines and veneer-grade content because that's enough to get the ad dollars, without the investment that original content would require. To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life. The large-scale effect is decidedly negative, though.

Retric 3y ago
Reputation is still valuable over time. Some YouTube creators I ignore irregardless of the thumbnail, while other content creators get a click automatically. The same happens with websites and everywhere else in the attention economy.
- oangemangut 3y ago
  some content creators I click on _despite_ them having to do the click-bait stupid YouTube thumbnails. As an aside - word you may have been looking for is irrespective, or perhaps just plain old regardless. irregardless is not a word.
  - function_seven 3y ago
    > irregardless is not a word. Lots of dictionaries disagree. But not me! I'll join you on this hill, regardless of what those dumb dictionaries say. The misuse of "literally" and the common use of "irregardless" are the red pills that have turned me into a crotchety old ... prescriptivist.
    - narcraft 3y ago
      People say that people use literally to mean figuratively now which is literally the opposite of literally, but I've literally never seen someone use literally to mean figuratively. I have often seen it used to hyperbolize the strength of analogies or generalizations, which means they apply literally somewhat figuratively, but that doesn't mean that they literally mean for literally to mean figuratively.