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TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
- seydor 1y agoI m more annoyed that everything is in portrait. But yeah, there's a dehumanization going on. Speeding up videos to deliver the maximum words per second to the viewer is inhuman. It started as an appeal to ADHD children, but i that meme is overdone, people actually do have attention and still interested in humans, not just what they say.
- reddit_clone 1y agoI am getting annoyed at this accelerated speech shorts and move on to something else. Especially watching recipes. Somehow the breathless speech pattern they all adopt is really irritating to me. Thats saying something coming from an ADHD person.
- nextworddev 1y agoAt whose expense?
- Funes- 1y agoEveryone's.
- Zak 1y agoThe article offers several options depending on the question's perspective. The commercial answer would be publishers of longer-form content, but the more sociologically important one would be that it is harming the ability of the average person to engage with long-form information, making the phenomenon costly to the whole world.
- tsunamifury 1y agoThe idea that long form = good is absurd and this type of thinking shows how over-confident this author is in their own intelligence. Information compression and storage is the baseline of our species evolution.
- Zak 1y agoAhh, it seems I made my comment too short. I don't think that long-form content is always superior to short, but I do think overconsumption of short-form content reduces peoples' ability to handle irreducible complexity.
- tsunamifury 1y agoAgree the act of compression itself is likely a huge part of intelligence. Also appreciate the joke.
- ndriscoll 1y agoThis post popped up a blocking window before I was even 3 sentences in, so maybe unsurprising that I clicked away in less than 60 seconds. If the author wants people to read whatever it is they have to say, maybe they should not put distractions in front of their writing?
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI intentionally do not use adblockers, but when your ads either dominate the page, or prevent me from navigating, I close the tab.
- j1elo 1y agoWow it is that bad! It's a white full screen on-your-face message that no one asked for, and it literally appears as soon as you start reading the content! If that wasn't ironic enough to the title of the article, upon hitting the "X" and then "Back" on my phone (because it generated enough rejection on me that I didn't want to keep reading), the popup appeared again (-: so double annoyance for the price of one.
- skulk 1y agoThe worst part is that it pushes an item onto the history stack both when it opens and closes. So I need to press back 3 times to go back. It's a small thing to complain about but it's still atrocious.
- elpocko 1y agoOP is only here to promote their own content, never comments, never posts anything other than their own blog.
- bee_rider 1y agoIt is sort of impressive, they seem to have keyed to what sort of posts make it here quite quickly (two failures, then two successes at getting engagement).
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- nottorp 1y ago... but everything was mostly crap and not worth your time even before it was 60 seconds long. If you spend your days watching "content" it's your fault.
- Funes- 1y agoThe "shit" to "good" ratio in literally every field was much less skewed to the "shit" side before smartphones and social media came along. It's always this same fallacy: "hey, that was always a thing!". Sure, drugs have "always" been a thing, but did you have fentanyl producing real-life zombie parades in the streets just ten years ago? If we make these reductionist claims, we can say just about every phenomenon was already a thing a hundred thousand years ago. We have to think about the degree to which something is occurring as well, and how it is taking place, not just try to dismiss it through knee-jerk intended retorts.
- nottorp 1y agoYou missed my second statement, I think. How about instead of lamenting the existence of social networking and smartphones (by the way, social networking has the same effect on a laptop), we try to educate people to not waste their time on "content"?
- alchemical_piss 1y agoWe’ve been trying to “educate” people on nutrition for a long time, but this country is still fat as hell.
- Funes- 1y ago>You missed my second statement, I think. I didn't. Nothing in my post could possibly make any reasonable person think I missed it. It bears no connection whatsoever to it, nor does it contradict anything I wrote. >social networking has the same effect on a laptop You carry your laptop literally everywhere you go and use it in every imaginable situation you can find yourself in for more than six straight hours every day? You really pull out your laptop while waiting in line at the grocery store? You text on it while driving? You use your laptop strolling down the street at any given moment, or at restaurants with friends, really? Get real.
- zoba 1y agoSo strange to think about how Vine could’ve won this and an American company could’ve been the leader here.
- crazysim 1y agoIt got Kodak'd.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoThey really dropped the ball.
- xnx 1y agoA reminder of how much of success is luck/timing.
- moduspol 1y agoAnd remember Quibi [1]? Short-form video in vertical format specifically for mobile devices? They didn't have every aspect nailed, but they were definitely trailblazers on that front. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi
- apparent 1y agoWas that at all like TikTok? I thought it was professional creators, not community-sourced.
- AlexAplin 1y agoQuibi launched in April 2020. TikTok by this point would have 2 billion downloads [1]. It's difficult to assess they were trailblazers here. I might even say a component of their failure is free mobile video was widely accessible by this point. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241788/tiktok-app-download-numbers-update-2-billion-users https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241788/tiktok-app-downl...
- m0llusk 1y agoDidn't have every aspect nailed? Definitely trailblazers? Quibi is a prime example of an absolute business wipeout. They got a bunch of investor money together, showed no interest in what viewers actually want, and then went down in flames immediately upon public release of the product. The whole thing was a disaster that didn't accomplish anything beyond putting a bunch of capital in the pockets of C grade C suite players.
- atlintots 1y agoFor me, the worst part is that it is so hard to go back to previous forms of media. I often delete these short form content apps in an effort to quit them, but it is now so difficult to get engaged with "slower" forms of media. The thing with Tiktok isn't the length of the media, it's just how fast-paced and "catchy" it is. I could watch an hour long fast paced video just fine, but watching a slow paced show, or reading a book is so much more difficult. It truly is like a drug.
- boringg 1y agoYou let your dopamine loop get hacked
- jollyllama 1y agoThis. It's going to take some serious effort to un-wirehead yourself. Look to religious traditions for methods. Meditation, fasting, prayer.
- fennecbutt 1y agoOr just walk outside lmao. Those religious traditions have roots in control and manipulation.
- dleeftink 1y agoThe first step to recovery is... You'll get there. Go from shorter form content to things that'll grab your attention, piece by piece.
- mtalantikite 1y ago> I could watch an hour long fast paced video just fine, but watching a slow paced show, or reading a book is so much more difficult. Attention and concentration are skills that can be trained, so not all is lost. I was feeling like I was losing my focus about a decade ago and decided that every morning I'd wake up and read a novel for 30 minutes or so. Within a few weeks you'll notice the difference.
- keiferski 1y agoToo simple of a narrative. At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2025/02/12/launched-20-years-ago-more-people-are-now-watching-youtube-on-tv/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2025/02/12/launched-... So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds. The most popular video creators are doing both; even MrBeast routinely has videos over 30 minutes long.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- quxbar 1y agoI won't even look at a youtube video essay about an obscure vintage RPG (my preferred form of guilty pleasure viewing) if it's under 20 minutes long.
- malignblade 1y agoGoing to need some recommendations
- aspenmayer 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQVdR8mJrds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQVdR8mJrds The Making of Vampire Survivors by noclip. Vintage inspired with the game choice, not straight vintage, but noclip is one of the best doing game documentaries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZmcbShMFNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZmcbShMFNY The Story of Thief & Looking Glass Studios, also by noclip. As vintage as they come.
- Hovertruck 1y agoCheck out Majuular
- deleted 1y ago
- FinnKuhn 1y agoConsidering that YouTube is still wildly successful and TikTok is now showing me 5+ minute long videos I really don't think this theory holds up. I would say short-form content found a gap in the market and now exists in addition to long-form content without replacing it.
- dcchambers 1y ago> TikTok won. Now everything is 60 seconds. It's true and it's devastating. I intentionally never signed up for TikTok because of the dangers of hyper-addictive short form content. Ultra-processed, junk food content. But my Instagram became TikTok - so now I don't use Instagram. My YouTube is becoming TikTok - so now I don't use YouTube. Everything is implementing autoplaying short form content. X/Twitter. Reddit. etc. TikTok won, and we're all worse off for it.
- bogtog 1y ago> But my Instagram became TikTok - so now I don't use Instagram. My YouTube is becoming TikTok - so now I don't use YouTube. Everything is implementing autoplaying short form content. X/Twitter. Reddit. etc. There are notably numerous Chrome/Firefox extensions that will hide Shorts from the YouTube homescreen. Plenty of creators are still focusing on normal-length content
- dcchambers 1y agoYes, and I use those on my desktop. Doesn't help with the mobile apps though. I guess the solution is just no YouTube on the phone. The one that upsets me the most is Instagrams shift from photos to video. I miss seeing cool photos from my friends.
- josefresco 1y agoEven the new ESPN app has short form videos called "Verts".
- nadermx 1y agoI mean if you must, you can always save things off tiktok by removing the "ok" from the URL, ending up at https://tikt.com https://tikt.com, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283876
- FjordWarden 1y ago> The irony, of course, is that if you've read this far, it may mean you’ve already mastered a rare skill: sustained attention in a world of distraction. No, sorry I read the first and last sentence. This is why I like the short format more then the long forms, it often boils down to the same clever narrative trickery without waisting 3 hours of your life.
- righthand 1y agoSo you didn’t read that far then. You intentionally skipped it because you assumed to know the value. However by skipping the article you didn’t gain any value and hence why you’re in the comments section trying to “gotcha” the author of the article. You missed the point entirely and not as clever as you think. It did not take me 3 hours to read that article.
- kshacker 1y agoI am traveling to India and unfortunately "our services are not available in your country or region". And a few months back we were all singing "oh wen ji" (really badly paraphrased) on RedNote when TikTok was already down pending reinstatement by Trump. Point being TikTok js a winner in a slice of the population. I just stopped following the bunch of Indian folks even though they had an Instagram or reel account because I just could not get used to it. Similarly I followed a few people on rednote but promptly abandoned it when TT came back. So maybe TT won. But look at it from the other side. People in India and China don't follow what I follow. And there are billions of those. TikTok is an awesome platform but not yet a "too big to fail" like YouTube I guess Edit. But I get the point of 60 second media winning. Nowadays I am just unable to focus on a tv show. Or I am watching a show with some digression (Reddit, tiktok) in my hand. Theaters is the only place I am unable to do so and that's the only place I now enjoy movies I guess.
- daedrdev 1y agoYoutube forces 30 seconds of adds multiple times a video. Tiktok has absolutely become more popular than youtube thanks to its less intrusive ads.
- knowaveragejoe 1y agotiktok videos themselves are often just ads.
- cwillu 1y agoBut they're not forced.
- sirbutters 1y agoAm I the only one who absolutely despises vertical videos? For that reason alone I would not touch TikTok with a 10ft pole.
- daedrdev 1y agoI would never watch them on a computer but they fit well on a phone in one hand
- throw0101d 1y agoAre there generational differences? Do (say) Boomers or GenXers use different social media sites/apps than Millennials which are different than Gen Z?
- westurner 1y agoVine had 6 second short form video in 2012. Vine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) Short-form content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-form_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-form_content YouTube still requires disconnecting connected chromecast devices to view YouTube Shorts?
- accrual 1y agoI'm going to be the odd duck here and suggest TikTok has been helpful for me. I view it as a tool. It can be used in a harmful way (scrolling for hours, reduced attention span) but it can also be helpful if used correctly. It's kind of like Reddit and other "customize your feed" social media. If you subscribe to the defaults, yeah, it's hot garbage. If you select content creators or topics that support your individual growth then you get a much different outcome. Of course not to say I couldn't have benefited from the same topics via another type of media. But I enjoy the few minutes I spend on TT per day, seeing what my favorites have posted, etc. I even met a cool dummer named Zooich in Japan who I enjoy following and interacting with each week. And I've made a bit of content myself which I'm proud of. Lastly, in no way does my positive experience diminish the negative issues surrounding TT. I fully agree it contributes to reduced attention span, spreading misinformation, etc. -- just like most other forms of social media. And there's a very real risk of it becoming state media in the future. I just wanted to provide a different perspective other than "TT is terrible in every way, ban it!".
- mrtksn 1y agoYea, because it's a superior format. I love YouTube but my problem with the content of YouTube is that almost all videos are introducing you to everything every time. For example, there's this science video about this interesting property of fire right? They start with what's fire, when it was invented, what led to be studied this way and then they deliver the money shot. It is O.K. to be introduced to a topic once but it is brain wrecking to be 101ed every time. They are doing it to increase the watch time and the ad revenue and its horrible. Forcing the videos to be short makes them deliver the gist quickly, TikTok videos that are trying to the introduction 101 thing are just as horrible, when a video is over 1min I'm very skeptical and feel the urge to move on. Of course in-depth videos need to be long but those are not that many actually. From the pop-sci genre Veritasuim does it well but that kind of production takes long time and they publish videos every now and then. With the race to pump videos as quickly as possible, the short format is the better since you can get the content quickly and if you want to know more about it you can actually read about it. Which is how you actually learn anything BTW.
- skizm 1y agoWadsworth Constant. Skip to 30% of any video that seems like they're dragging out the intro.
- ziml77 1y agoOr install SponsorBlock. One of the things people can submit other than sponsor segments is the most interesting point in the video. Basically, whatever is teased in the thumbnail or what directly answers the question posed in the video title.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoYoutube now shows you the peaks where most people skip towards
- janalsncm 1y agoThis is called “fluff” which I feel is too nice a term for how annoying it is. Start with a clickbait question, then give a complete history ripped off of Wikipedia, then by the end they don’t even fully answer the question. Very frustrating.
- DrewADesign 1y agoI’ll bet some number of readers here asked an LLM to summarize this article.
- righthand 1y agoIt’s ads for the generation that didn’t grow up with no-choice broadcast advertising.
- smittywerben 1y agoThere's olympics for persons with disabilities. TikTok is in one of those but with other similarly sized companies. News at 11: 1080p today looks worse than 5 years ago, ending a a two decade streak of innovation and improvement to the world's telecom system.
- coldtea 1y agoTikTok and those consuming it can rot. Some of us will continue to be reading War and Peace level works and watch "lengthy" movies.
- mdavid626 1y agoIF there will be “lengthy” movies.
- coldtea 1y agoThere a stock of older movies though, bigger than I can watch in a lifetime, and that's just considering the good ones.
- int_19h 1y agoWar and Peace is hardly a stellar example of good literature, though. Tolstoy in general is very overrated, and W&P especially so.
- coldtea 1y ago>War and Peace is hardly a stellar example of good literature, though Based on some totally idiosyncratic personal assement maybe. Not in any canonical ranking (or in mine).
- lloydatkinson 1y agoIs the posting account a bot? It’s posted only links and zero comments since it was created.
- markus_zhang 1y agoJust don’t install the app. I never did that and I want to make sure my son doesn’t whence he gets his own phone. Well he can do whatever when he is an adult but that’s more than a decade away.
- xenadu02 1y agoI deleted TikTok and my Twitter account. Also stopped watching TV. I'm happier and more productive.
- ambicapter 1y agoFitter? Comfortable? Not drinking so much? Regular exercise at the gym? Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries?
- Y_Y 1y agoA pig, in a cage, on antibiotics https://genius.com/Radiohead-fitter-happier-lyrics https://genius.com/Radiohead-fitter-happier-lyrics Ok Computer came out twenty-eight years ago (!)
- rietta 1y agoI HATE short form videos with an abiding passion. As a user, my preference is long form YouTube videos I can listen to while my hands are busy with the dishes, dog walks, etc. I am ventured more into podcasts because even such videos are painfully annoying with ad interruptions that demand skip click. Under no circumstances do I want to interact with the device every 60-90 seconds. That totally defeats the purpose of listening while being productive in the day.
- pessimizer 1y agoThis is terrible to say, but if 170 million people are spending an hour a day watching 60 second videos, aren't they just dumb and easily entertained? Without this, wouldn't they just be consuming other dumb entertainment, or failing to find that dumb entertainment, going outside, and meeting other dumb people in order to do stupid things? Also, I'm sure I have to subtract a huge number of these people from the dumb list, because they probably just watch a bunch of TikTok to unwind or get summaries of the events of the day, then move on to real content. People spend a lot more than an hour in front of screens, and have for the past 75 years. Plenty of the world was already watching dumb short animal videos, fail videos, success videos, astonishing videos, etc. long before TikTok. Early youtube absolutely despised and made difficult uploading videos over 10 minutes. The thing was made to share tsunami videos and what were basically animated personal snapshots. Acting like this is a qualitative change is just easy ragebait, and this story has been written again and again since MTV debuted (which is why it felt the need to refer to it.) That was almost 50 years ago. edit: Martha Quinn is 66 years old.
- mock-possum 1y agoI’ll have to take your word for it, I’m not on TikTok.
- firefoxd 1y agoI've banned shorts from my house [0]. The more you watch it, the more your attention span gets scrambled. If a joke doesn't land in 15 seconds, you skip it. If the video that just started doesn't reach its climax now, you skip it. There's actually a format for movies now, where a short scene is shared with the contrast cranked to 11, and background music. And it pays off in under a minute. Shorts is short for climax, and everything over a minute is boring. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/shorts-climax https://idiallo.com/blog/shorts-climax
- fennecbutt 1y agoBut to be fair, there's the opposite end of the spectrum where our time is being wasted. Like the whole life story before the recipe type thing. Or American YouTubers intentionally speaking veeeerrrryyyy sloooowwwwllllyyy.
- euroderf 1y agoOr Faceborg videos that cannot be fast-forwarded and have no progress bar, leaving unanswered the musical question "When does it get to the point, if ever ??"
- tsunamifury 1y agoInformation compression and hyper-stimulation are two different things. Many forms of content online have become meaningless long form slop that could get to the point in less than 10 seconds, but are drawn out to drive view-time advertising metrics. Fast and compressed is also a sign of intelligence rather than 'stupidity' as so many faux iconoclasts like to say. Our media storage over the last 5,000 years has most been about compression and speed, and to those who dismiss that... I dunno I guess I'll just quote Socrates succinctly "Books are for the stupid."
- throwaw12 1y ago[flagged]
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoTo be fair, you can just ignore TicToc. Okay... maybe you can't. Maybe there are people in your life that won't let you forget it exists. Maybe your job is in communications and you have to get on TicToc (or YouTube or InstaGram or whatever.) 170 million people is about half the U.S. population. And I can't say this without sounding like an elitist pr*k, but it's always seemed like about half the population is below average. (And since we're all savvy consumers of statistics here, we all know that attempt at a joke would be better if I said "half the population is below the median.") So assuming an algorithmic dopamine-stroking video platform is a social evil, maybe people are susceptible to it because there's something missing in their lives? I don't watch a lot of TV and look at the internet mostly through a text based browser. Mostly because I KNOW I have attention problems. I don't need flashy ads bombarding me with distractions. But mostly it's because I do a lot of other things that aren't watching videos that are more fulfilling (like commenting on HN threads.) I don't know if this is true... but I like to play the game where you think about how the world would have to change for various statements to become true. (It's fun to wallow in the swampy mud-bath of your own imagination.) What if... TicToc (and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and all the other attention sucking apps) are a net benefit to people's lives? I know it's en vogue to bash new media dealers and clutch our collective pearls. But if traditional media could get these engagement numbers, I can't imagine they wouldn't. Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow have been dead for decades. If, as a culture, we valued the Children's Television Workshop, we would have funded them publicly instead of letting them crawl into (financial) bed with NBC/Universal and Warner Brothers. So sure... maybe TicToc is evil, but what alternative are we offering the half of society that wants their midbrain stroked?
- alchemical_piss 1y ago> I know it's en vogue to bash new media dealers and clutch our collective pearls. But if traditional media could get these engagement numbers, I can't imagine they wouldn't. At least legacy media wasn’t directly promoting and rewarding antisocial behavior and crimes.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoMy joke here would be to say "oh yeah! they seemed to encourage participation in voting!" But HN is not a place for humor, or my imitation of humor. But to your point... yes... gate-keepers can keep out the riffraff. (And I'm not trying to be snarky with that last statement.) Taste-makers can steer the listening public towards some competent art. As a society we tend to swing back and forth between freedom and conformity. We're in a pretty "free" feeling era and the word "conformity" is almost a pejorative. Monoculture is dangerous, but sure, so is letting the moral equivalent of the Manson Family loose on your child's phone. (not implying TikTok is the modern Manson equivalent, just hypothesizing the existence of a really bad player in the digital realm.) Is there a middle ground? Would we recognize it when we see it? Do societal leaders and taste makers have a duty or right to discourage the use of media platforms? I always got the impression the reason TikTok was singled out was 'cause it's from China (and Singapore as well somehow.) I would love it if the people who are singling out TikTok for playing fast and loose with our dopamine regulatory system explained how western companies (Facebook, YouTube, Hacker News) aren't. Feel free to stop reading at this point, if you haven't already. I'm well beyond replying (and mostly agreeing) to (with) your comment. Now I'm just rambling. I have this memory of a picture of soviet workers sitting in an auditorium listening to classical music. It was around the 40s or 50s so I'm sure it was Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich or Rachmaninoff or Khachaturian. And they had completely blank looks on their faces like "okay. my boss says I have to be here, so I'm here." Me? I can't get enough of these guys and would definitely have a smile on my face if I got to get off work early to listen to them. But... as taste-makers and culture gate-keepers, would we prefer to force people to consume "high culture" when all they want is TikTok? I mean, I would much rather read Louise Glück than watch Housewives of Some Random Town. (Sorry Glück folks, I'm just not a fan.) But if someone doesn't care for Henry Miller (any one of his books I could read over and over again), I would much rather they not be coerced into reading them. I love W. H. Auden and my spouse loves Bukowski. It's okay to enjoy what you enjoy. I dunno. I think the article mentioned above seems a little gate-keepery. And I get it that we're worried about how people are being manipulated by media controlled by a foreign political power, but if we're gonna ban TikTok, maybe we should spend at least as much thought about what we're going to replace it with.
- ryankrage77 1y agoI got addicted to YT shorts for a little while, but I've mostly stopped doomscrolling now as, counter-intuitively, it wasn't addictive enough to keep me engaged. Sure, the first few dozen hours the carefully designed feedback loop keeps you engaged, and then... it wore off, at least for me. The algorithm seemed more interested in pushing what was popular than what I was interested in. I tried gaming it by quickly scrolling past things I didn't care about or had already seen a million times (like those retention farming 3-second loops of reddit/twitter screenshots), and hanging around on stuff I liked, but it didn't seem to budge the needle. I guess it's a lot like real drugs - you build a tolerance and you need a bigger dose to get the same effect. In this case, no bigger dose is available.
- ambicapter 1y agoYT being riddled with bugs helped me with this one. My Shorts feed sometimes (often) starts looping after 5-6 videos.
- kelseyfrog 1y agoReading Debord's Society of the Spectacle in the age of TikTok is surreal. In some ways, it reads like prophecy. He mapped the inevitability of image-mediated life before we had the feeds to prove him right. In other ways, it feels trivial. Today's hyperreality makes the theory so obvious it barely registers as theory at all, more like a weather report. We don’t have to imagine the spectacle when we're already drowning in it. My gripe with "How is new media transforming us?" journalism is that it never gets past the pre-theoretical stage. It inventories symptoms: shorter attention spans, algorithmic optimization, but won't name the cause. It's like reporting the moon's position every night and refusing to mention gravity. The point that matters is Debord's: social relations mediated by images have replaced embodied relations. Platforms sell us connection, but what they deliver is commodification. Yes, some internet friendships spill into real life. But most are fragile, living inside economic structures designed to monetize attention. Everyone already knows the real relation isn't friend-to-friend but user-to-advertiser, and money always wins. That's the basecamp for any way out: recognizing that hyperreal social life can't substitute lived social life. The spectacle doesn't mediate friendship, it mediates consumption. And if Debord feels obvious now, that's only because his warning has become the background condition of everyday life. Facebook can't really connect you to friends; it can only connect you to advertisers.
- Dilettante_ 1y agoThank you for the reminder, dear imaginary person on my screen.
- pier25 1y ago"All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Very prescient given the book is from 1967.
- miladyincontrol 1y agoMuch as many insist they dont and will never use AI, all too many let their entire media feeds, if not their whole personality be defined by `recommendation_watchnext.serve()`
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- buyucu 1y agoFacebook and Instagram did this a decade before Tiktok.
- nadermx 1y agoDoes no one remember vine? They showed there was a niche for a certain type of content. I think it all generally boils down to a sort of comparison of cell phone vs desktop vs maybe even laptop. It's not that when one came out the other was used less. It's instead that each was used now for different purposes, so usage in total basically 2-3x'd.
- mdavid626 1y agoI could easily watch TikTok short for 10 hours or more. No problem at all. I’d ban shorts immediately. It’s like crack or fentanyl. We lost control long time ago.
- greenhearth 1y agoIt's basically television^1000. TV was also constantly criticized for reducing critical thinking skills and championing mediocrity. Douglas Adams put it best of course: "the future is the same old stuff with faster cars"
- NooneAtAll3 1y agoI want to note that culture has been shaped by recommendation algorithm looong before tiktok... First time I noticed that was "we are number one" meme in autumn 2016
- jaredcwhite 1y agoI'm not on TikTok and never have been, but I've seen plenty of shortform videos shared elsewhere. Here's the thing about all of them. They never inform. The number of video creators I can actually recall and point to who have affected me on any real emotional or intellectual level via shorts I can count on one hand. "Old-school" longform video (on YouTube and elsewhere) is a medium with real utility and artistic merit. Shorts are mildly entertaining at best and mind-numbing goop at worst. And, as usual, the meme is true: *this could have been a blog post.*
- AfterHIA 1y ago[flagged]
- quasse 1y ago> Something or someone really, really wants you to be comfortable with violence. Instagram started serving me violent content out of the blue recently. My reels feed went from mostly hiking and skiing videos to POV videos from Ukrainian and Russian grenade drones and accelerationist "joke" videos normalizing the idea of war with China. It was like a switch had flipped with how suddenly the app was like "let's warp this guy's sense of normalcy".
- tomhow 1y agoComments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- omikun 1y agoI used to love watching the hour long essays but after notebooklm I just get a briefing summary and realize most of these essays are mostly vibes.
- freehorse 1y agoTwitter did this already for the text form. In depth analysis articles and blogposts got replaced with whatever could fit in 40 characters and what mattered more than anything was the impression. It changed how politics is done, so I would say it had an even bigger impact to society. It is all depressing. As if the spectacle has devoured the whole reality and there is now nothing but it.
- wallopinski 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- resters 1y agoTiktok has such a better feed algorithm than any of the incumbents. You see what you like, plain and simple. It made me realize how much the incumbents myopically prioritize ad engagement above all else.
- givemeethekeys 1y agoWould someone be able to explain how I, as someone who has never installed TikTok be interfacing with this new change in culture?
- akk0 1y agoWhat a shockingly vacuous article, I don't think it says much other than dressing up the idea of people watching 60 second videos in the most cartoonishly alarmist language conceivable. If there actually is a reason to believe that "attention spans" are getting "damaged" by watching silly videos, TFA doesn't show any -- I always just see this stated as fact, but a priori in the absence of evidence I find it a very extraordinary claim. Then again, if it's effective enough at maximizing psychological grip to hold people's attention for a full hour every day, maybe we should be getting worried... /s >Song introductions have shortened dramatically, with one study finding average intros fell from more than 20 seconds in the 1980s to just five I expect the decline of radio is the cause of this