Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism.
Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.
For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.
I haven't watched the news in 5 years. I started watching it again since Bondi (I live nearby), and while I'm surprised at the variation in reporting styles (political bias?) between Australian channels, my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
I've found it very helpful to watch the live briefings, Q&As, etc with politicians, but the news cycle here is so short (hourly) that a few minutes later you get to hear a "recap" by the news reporter that glosses over most of the important and interesting points (at best) or actively removes key nuance and outright changes the message delivered by the original person (at worst).
I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
Presumably this was what "journalism" was originally supposed to be.
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveye
Much of it is merely factual statements conveyed by over-the-top body language and vocal intonation which paint a clear "this is bad" or "this is good" language. Often the language is biased as well, but the modern newscasters are "telling you how to feel" via the tone of voice in the same way that a friend is "telling you how to feel" when he recounts his horrible day that the office. Via body language and tone of voice he prompts you to respond sympathetically to him, and the newscaster does much the same.
I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters, the idea that research/journalism is hot-swappable with fact-checking.
Sometimes in conversation Israel or tariffs or whatever comes and I'm always like... idk? What do I, have a PHD? I know enough to know they're complex issues and the worst thing i could do is have a strong opinion
And then they scoff, and say, "so you just 'trust the experts,' then?"
I don't have the time to become expert in global affairs, history, climate science... all the fields implicated by the big hot-button issues. The next best thing is defer to someone knowledgeable and objective (given you can find such a person), IMO.
> I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters
So much this! Social media has also allowed people to reinforce their own opinions and spread them by connecting with others who think the same way. Back when we mainly interacted in real social communities, fringe ideas couldn't get traction because there wasn't enough reinforcement.
Neither of those are topics that are particularly complex, though.
And I realize that I'm taking the bait, but it's worth noting that the flip-side of the oversimplification of complex topics in modern news media is the affordance of notions of complexity to issues that are fairly cut-and-dry, when applying known and well-accepted standards to them. Solving housing issues in the US? Complex, though news media would have you believe that the answer is simply, "Build more." Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Simple, though biased experts spend enormous amounts of energy spinning extant circumstances that are readily accounted for in most definitions of genocide. Tariffs? Very well understood. Ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Apparently a bit more difficult than flooding the country with weapons and finger-wagging at Vladimir Putin until he stops being bad.
Note also that this isn't predicated on the existence or non-existence of social media as an influential force. It's simply a matter of whether or not the corporate and political interests that steer public discourse find it useful to complicate or simplify a news story.
I have found that, often, there is only so much information to convey. They keep talking because that is their job, but you've already been told all there is to know. The rest is speculation, rumor, and prattle.
That's especially true for evolving emergencies like Bondi. In my opinion, you might as well wait until tomorrow, or next week, and get all of the information at once. Unless, of course, you're involved, but that's extremely rare.
I watch news (and everything else) on YouTube at 2x speed to keep the information density high enough to be worthwhile. Once you get used to it, regular media becomes less tolerable because everyone is talking too slow.
Where possible you want everyone to be well informed on the way in, at least about the current situation and the obvious proposals. This gives people time to digest the information and maybe even suggest their own proposals.
Then there's two types of meetings.
* Leadership communication meetings (quick review to make sure everyone understands how important the data they already knew about is / cement context).
* Brainstorming meetings (figure out a plan / pathfinding)
The 2x speed will only keep your brain preoccupied enough not to notice the relevant information is missing or made very shallow... getting the same slop in half the time won't solve the problem.
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
This is the key. I think they (entertainers cosplaying as journalists) do it on purpose. For example, from time to time I do attempt to watch some "news" on TV with my partner.
A typical interaction may be:
- TV - "..the president vetoed a bill to lower taxes...here is what this politician thinks: 'I think he only cares to gain support of the extremists he secretly supports', and here is what another politician thinks 'it was a bad bill'"
- me to my partner - "did I miss it? have they said what the bill was about? What were the exact things that were questionable?"
- her - "nope"
- TV - "... The president says he will be submitting a similar bill minus the parts he disagreed with, and now a house burned down in..."
- me - "WTF was that?"
I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
> I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
Exactly my impression. I tell people there is no real news in the United States, only gossip style reporting of information one can do nothing about and has nothing to do with them. If the reporting it political, it's in 4th grade language and a second grade mentality. News in the United States is talking to children.
It’s not even a game. There just isn’t that much news to report on 24/7. And even when an event does happen, the early reports are often wrong. People crave an update when there is no update to give.
We are not given any factual and material information on business activities in the nation, which is what the nation is actually doing. Who (as in companies) are gaining, are losing, and how is this economic conflict manifesting for their consumers and employees? None of that reporting is performed, the population is too shallow minded to even understand the discussion. Where are the local economics news that graduates to county, state and region with actionable numbers and not pointless no-ground reporting like "the stock market has trading volume of x trillions" <- useless information.
We get sports and entertainment news, which is not news, not really, not at all.
> I haven't watched the news in 5 years. ...my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
They're more concerned in being the first than being accurate.
Unless the event is something definitive like "celebrity died", it's much better to just check what happened a few days later when there are some actual facts and not just rushed speculation masquerading as facts.
I'd pay a modest subscription for a service that would give me the news, but just delayed by 24-72 hours, after all the "BREAKING NEWS" crap is just "news".
Part of the challenge is unless you know what the "news reporter's" role is (are they just reporting what they see/have heard vs. analysis/opinion and what their relevant expertise is; I'd suggest good news providers have clear divides and provide this information (though with biases), those that don't likely have some agenda), you get a mix of voices/views without a clear understanding of the facts. A different challenge is constraints of the various content formats/audiences (which are really only obvious when the same journalist does the same story in different formats).
I'll also add that paradoxically, bias is not really the problem here, but rather the problem is bias-disguised as objectivity. There's truly nothing wrong with a commentator who states "I have a particular view on this issue. Here are some of the things which inform my view. Here are the strengths of my view, here are the weaknesses, and here are what some of my opponents argue."
What we didn't know back in the 1990s was how little this sort of presentation (that you describe) was engaging. Everyone could sort of tell, which is why producers shied away from it, but with the rise of algorithms and internet slop it can be measured very precisely. And the measurements show that it's damn near close to zero, on whatever scale it is that they use.
Intelligent people are boring. They're worried about problem-solving. Problems like on the tests back in school that used to make my head hurt, problems I'd get the red X on and have to repeat 3rd grade over because of. Unintelligent people are exciting. They're in conflict. They're fighting, or going to find a fight somewhere, and if you watch long enough they might even get into that fight right then and there (Bill O'Reilly used to do that on air, after all).
IMO "just reporting what they see" is a solution at all. I tried looking at messages through that angle, and too often there is very important context that you need, or the message's content does not make sense, or becomes something different.
For example, we have plenty of "journalism" that reports exactly what some entity says. That just makes them a PR channel. If they added context that politician's or company's message's content's meaning would turn on its head and would be exposed as a lie.
Similarly, a lot of news would greatly benefit from larger context that just is not there, and that the vast majority of "consumers" of the news are simply not aware of, through no fault of their own.
"Just report what you see" IMHO is part of the problem, not the solution. It's trying to "solve" the reporting problem by removing most of the role of journalists because they are seen as unreliable, for good reasons, but I don't think that works at all. It is similar to trying to solve all problems by adding ever more rules for everything, to remove the uncertainty and unreliability of individual decisions.
This is just like at work, where the capital owners and bosses would love to replace all those pesky annoying opinionated humans with something more controllable and predictable. If the intelligence can be moved from the people into the process, the latter become replaceable and much cheaper, and the company gets much more control. But it is not just the owner class that does not like having to rely on and to deal with other humans.
I think the direction of development of the role of journalists has actually gone way too far in exactly the direction of them using less and less of their own brains, and having less influence and ability, for most messages, the very few deeper pieces notwithstanding.
Although, none of that will do anything as long as the news source owner structure is the way it is, with a few billionaires controlling most of the big news sources.
Only doing "just reporting what they see" is a problem as well (and even AP (https://apnews.com/) does analysis, and their more on the "just reporting what they see" side than most news providers), but opinions being presented as facts is far more common (at least from the mainstream AU media, I don't know what the situation is elsewhere), hence trying to clearly demarcate the two is better than being unclear about what you are presenting. You need facts and analysis, and them labelled as such.
Personally, I find a good example of this is the different election broadcasts: the commercial TV broadcasters tend to have their staff take both the role of election analyst (i.e. result prediction) and commentator, whereas the ABC (one of the public broadcasters) has tended to have clear separation of roles (enough such that the election analyst who just retired has a cult following), with an election analyst who is giving detailed predictions and calls the election, political journalists providing context/analysis, polling experts covering what the polls missed/got right, and politicians from the major parties giving their opinions as well.
I used that book as a background example in a presentation I did you faculty on how to integrate new open resources into their classes. One guy in the back laughed really hard at that screen and everyone looked at him like he was a lunatic.
And that's the story of how I made a work best friend.
Seriously though, if you haven't read amusing ourselves to death you need to.
This is why I love listening to Joe Rogan, it’s hard for someone to keep to their coached media narrative for three and a half hours. I’m generally suspicious of people who tell me I shouldn’t listen directly to the words of people they dislike.
Though you are now buying into the Rogan worldview with his show, which is its own set of issues, namely he’s routinely proven that he’s unwilling to press people on real concrete issues or criticisms if it means he might be in even a small amount of hot water with whatever in group he’s catering to
Climate Town had a video a little while ago, "Joe Rogan Doesn't Understand Graphs", where Rogan talks about a Washington Post article and says things about it that are the exact opposite of what is written in the article:
Joe Rogan regularly has people on his show that he just lets lie to his face. The promotion of fake archaeology being the clearest/strangest example of this in recent times (many more examples from political guests).
> I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
I have found that some Youtube channels and videos (non-comprehensive examples below (I have hundreds of subscribed channels), mostly not politics, but these things inform politics since politics is making decisions about other things) can fill this gap nicely. This is not a perfect choice, since journalism integrity and standards do not apply, but I find that this can be mitigated by watching a wide variety (for example, in the field of economics, I regularly watch creators who espouse everything from very free-market capitalism all the way to full on communism). There are likely other forms of new media that operate at this level of depth, but I haven't found htem.
I started watching the full press releases and politicians interviews which are normally available on YouTube. It just changed how I view geopolitics. The media is extremely biased and absolutely does not report what people are actually saying. You really should never accept at face value what the news are reporting.
> I started watching the full press releases and politicians interviews which are normally available on YouTube.
Is this true for Australian politics? This is exactly what I'm looking for. Currently all my searching for recent events just results in summarised/paraphrased news reports with some footage, or shorts and clickbait.
>I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.
I love both books, but when you read Understanding Media you will see how blatantly Postman just restated McLuhan's basic thesis and pretended to tweak it to make it his own ("the medium is the metaphor" has the same meaning as "the medium is the message"). However, I found where Postman's book really excelled was in its presentation of the historical changes in literacy in the US. I knew we were a literate country once, but I didn't realize just how much we were.
Honestly, it boils down to capitalism / market pressure. Quality journalism is expensive, compared to the return in the form of the price people are willing to pay for that quality journalism. Clickbait is so profitable, it's like a powerful magnet pulling all news institutions, be they TV channels, newspapers, or whatever, towards that model.
LLMs can produce a literal terabyte of slop for cheaper than a month's wage for a journalist. I'm not hopeful.
Even when I was younger, I was baffled by how people could get their news just from TV, because the amount of information in a TV news report was so tiny compared to what you'd get in a newspaper. When I hear that people view TikTok as their main news source, it's like telling me people wear watermelons as socks. It's so nuts its hard for me to even bring the concept into my brain.
The TV will have maybe 5 stories, each told in one way only.
The Internet (including TikTok) will have nearly unlimited stories, told in unlimited ways.
I remember very well when just a few powerful people were allowed to decide what the public would be allowed to know and not know. They could suppress huge stories and leave the public in the dark. For example Chernobyl. They still try that today in print media and television, but have become a pathetic laughing stock now that information is free.
Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
An infinite stream of all possible information, true and false is exactly as useful as no information at all - and social media are getting pretty close to this ideal
That's a classic trick of opinion manipulation. You start an account that posts factual content that caters to target audience. Then once the rapport is built, you throw your narratives in. The barrier to do this, on scale, all the time has never been lower
All media is opinion manipulation. You could even stretch that to say that all communication is opinion manipulation.
Highly respected and highly ranked mass media sometimes publish outright lies and made up stories, completely knowingly. Because they are in the business of manipulation. So you have to trust your gut, and verify if something smells strange. Many times it isn't even possible to verify, as for much of war reporting.
There will never be a time when there will be an absolute guarantee of anything. Not as long as there are people.
I think there's a difference between trying to stay informed and seeking information. I swipe to my newsfeed and see seven stories ranging from local to national, from local news station to fox to New York times. Fact checking each of these stories will take time that I do not care to spend, and I imagine most folks will not.
“If you don’t care about false alarms, why do you listen to the fire alarm sounding and then evacuate the building? The only rational answer is that the fire alarm is just entertainment to you”
The rational answer is that they look at the news to see if there are any stories important and relevant enough that they would care to verify them.
Yes, agreed. News has become entertainment, because the standard for news has fallen so much. Which makes actual news harder for most people to attain.
> The Internet (including TikTok) will have nearly unlimited stories, told in unlimited ways.
Mainstream TV channels have their biases but "unlimited" doesn't actually mean anything if the content you're getting served is whatever the algorithm thinks will engage you, which is usually something that already aligns with your world view, or something that doesn't but is designed to outrage. Most average folks who browse the internet aren't looking past the sensational headlines they see in their Apple or Google curated news feeds.
>Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
Imagine talking about how the "internet has unlimited stories" and then following up with "people who use TikTok are better informed".
If you're getting the information by listening to one of those jackasses in their sing-song presenter voices... you're not getting information at all. You're functionally illiterate and hyponotized by someone who learned to exploit Youtube-style algorithms.
> Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
Possible, but also quite unlikely. From the people who post "news" on TikTok, I wonder how many spent at least 30-60 minutes on verifying what they're about to post? There is an endless sea of "influencers" who want to be first with posting something, that "validate what you're about to report" doesn't even enter the arena before they've posted their snippet. And if it's retracted, count on the video just silently disappearing.
Contrast that with TV and print that at least have some sort of validation, although imperfect, with editors and what not, that review things before they're published. Now of course, US media is a really shit example of proper journalism, as they've all fallen into basically doing "content creation", but if you look at other newspapers and news channels around the world, you'll see that proper journalism is still done, and the people pushing videos on TikTok usually do "content creation" very differently from TV and paper, with very different understanding of what they're actually contributing to.
There is a flip side to this. Yes it was stabilizing to have “boring” news where every provider largely had the same stories. But there was a narrower Overton window of issues to be discussed. A single thread of attention at any one time.
There are advantages to the disjointed, small, grassroots, often histrionic, news of today. We get a lot more perspectives in our news. We get so many it’s overwhelming (and we sadly need to jump into our corners to feel safe).
Anyone can start a Substack now and the market can decide if they’re a journalist. In my town there are several more trusted and prominent than the local broadcast news. Some specialize in a topic like housing. Some focus on govt going’s on. And of course there are local nutjobs (or I think they are, others disagree?
It’s messy and not nearly summarized, but in some ways it’s better and more detailed than bland evening news.
Current news media is even more narrowly focused on the three hot news stories of the day with 24-hour repetitive commentary all funneled into the narrative of the day.
Every generation experiences the current downgrade as catastrophic, only to later discover it was already a compromise layered on top of an earlier one
I think, at a minimum, a return to print or radio news is called for. They necessitate attentive consumption of information in a way that video just doesn't. I feel like they leave mental space open for critical thought. TikTok is the total opposite.
I don't know how bad TikTok is because shorts just don't grab hold of me hard enough to even look at the app, at most I see someone else sharing a short of something silly on a meme channel.
But… and I appreciate you did say "at a minimum"…
Radio is absolutely something you can have on in the background, vibrating your eardrums without engaging your attention.
Intentionality may be impossible in TikTok for all I know, but it isn't enough to just do radio, and I think also not print.
So if we try to walk up all the ladders of abstractions and get to the core where we cannot go yet another layer above, what we end up? Word of mouth basically?
My general view on TikTok is: why would I even remotely want to use something that's specifically designed to exploit me and manipulate me? The tiny shred of value I might experience (in the form of an occasional interesting video) is a side-effect of the service, and if they could get their value out of me and give me literally nothing at all, they would. This same perspective applies to all the centralized "social media" services out there today. None of them exist to make society better or improve the lives of anyone in any meaningful way (outside of enriching the executives and investors running them).
To be frank, the TikTok algorithm is the best of all the algorithmic doomscroll machines you can use.
Instagram is trash, Youtube Shorts is complete AI puke trash.
TikTok actually seems to "know" what I like seeing and clearly learns faster than the others.
A quick test just now:
- Video about Amiga 500 in the 90s in Finland
- A running gag about people having a Favourite Spoon
- A recipe for Bao Buns
- A skit about Japanese Shisa Kanko pointing and calling method
- Book reviews of someone's favourite books of 2025
- Someone tried to do floor work and found a massive shaft leading down under their house
Zero ads. All were from "real" people, not content farm accounts.
Instagram reels:
- A "family account" skit, yech
- Ad
- A verified account reposting other's videos
- Another one of those
- Ad
- A meme account
- A meme account
- Ad
Not even touching Youtube Shorts, they're even worse.
To be honest, it's pretty easy to surface useful content on TT. Its algorithm is far more responsive to, say, immediate skips and likes/follows than Ig or FB.
I have found it a lot easier to find a diversity of opinions from a more diverse group of folks there. Specifically, I have been really interested in what leftist/liberal bipoc folks think about current events, and it's very easy to get that content. And it's easy enough to flip quickly past hoteps and maga black men, who I don't usually care about hearing from. The disussions between say, black anarchists, pro-Harris DNC folks, and afropessimists have been very enlightening, personally.
Those aren't conversations I have been able to find on, say, Ig.
The main thing is that it pays a lot of attention to what you actually stop and watch, so if you let your attention wander you might end up watching folks rebuild industrial electric motors or paint warhammer minis.
Honestly, I think it's a lot less mind numbing than the last bits of broadcast TV or feature films folks have inflicted on me, regardless of folks enjoying their ability to hate on it.
I've tried multiple times with a TikTok account to get me useful videos and its always kids playing some weird games. FB/YT are much better and instantly switching content when I skip past a video.
I get a lot of stuff I care about (some scientific papers overviews, blender/davinci editing tips and tricks, bits of high-quality podcasts) on tiktok, even if I just go for 5 minutes to entertain myself with some audio-visual crap. Mention of its algorithm being responsive matches my observations here.
I think one good reason is connecting with the youth. My kids are too young for Tik Tok but old enough to come home with 6-7 (btw, best antidote to that is the 7-8-9 joke ;) ) and "chicken banana", and I'm told this comes from Tik Tok. I grew up in a house where every BSOD was caused by the fact that we installed video games, and I'd rather not be that kind of parent to my own kids. I'm also like GP though, I'd rather not go full scrollhead, so it's a bit of a dilemma.
As a former child, I'm not sure I would have wanted the adults mimicking my behavior. Back then I loved the occasions where the adults and us kids got together, such as festivities, and I got to hear their stories. They were all interesting and serious people though, with interesting lives and jobs (I was born in the 1970s and many of the adults had experienced WWII, or, the parents, the hard years following it - I am [East] German). No strange opinions about science or politics.
I think that's similar to when politicians try to "be like the people". I think "normal people", and children, prefer that their "betters" are actually examples of something better.
Agree. Your role as a parent is probably to serve as an example to them—even of old-fashioned, crufty ways. (Surprised/not-surprised to find my kids are curious about film cameras, vinyl, audio cassettes, MUDs, BBS'es…)
It's not a question of mimicking, it is interesting what is current within the teenage/student community. Adult population runs out of steam at some point.
I hear a lot of people be incredibly critical of TikTok, while being active consumers of Facebook/Instagram/X/etc. I've found the content on TikTok to be much better curated to what I actually like, with just enough (i.e., very little!) other content sprinkled in occasionally.
I asked someone a similar question to you a year ago and they told me something like "just spend 15 minutes with it. Aggressively swipe past things you aren't enjoying, like the the things you like. Search for something you are interested in too and like anything you like there". My feed is currently entirely basketball coaching tips for kids, cooking & recipes, stand up comedy, basic DIY, fitness/running tips, local restaurant recommendations, and sports highlights.
We don't have TikTok here (India), but I find YouTube shorts pretty useful. My feed is a mix of Action Labs shorts, Omar Agamy news, ZTT PC stuff, psychology, videos about animals (pet, domestic, wild), etc. I don't know what your standard for meaningful is, but the shorts are at least as useful as long form videos to me, if not more.
An important bit of context is that I prefer to get detailed information through text, research, sometimes podcasts, but rarely ever videos. The shorts serve as one low effort way (among others) for me to surface new potentially interesting things, to follow up on to the degree I find useful or interesting.
Closed-source, very-limited-API platforms like Tik Tok do not actually let you "play with the thing". What I imagine you would be interested in is a client which, say, gets the text version of a large number of short videos, filters those texts based on criteria you have defined and meta-data from TikTok (time, number of views, some proxies for a 'quality' measure) and serves you up with the results in a textual form, or perhaps a page with titles/summaries and links to the text and the video.
I'm not sure that's worth it but I'm willing to be this is not possible to achieve.
Why do people rag on TikTok? What the hell did you grow up on and did your parents and older folks from the previous generation not look down on that with a sigh or disgust??
Rock music? Rap? Video games??
In East Asia I see TikTok as pretty healthy, encouraging kids and even older people to be more active in public spaces, doing harmless dances or imitating other trends. It's actually pretty refreshing. Why you hatin?
Or is the West just salty that Facebook/YouTube/Instagram etc fell off as sterile in comparison?
I can actually remember when the consensus on HN was that TikTok was a novel, fresh experience that reminded them of the "old web" and its spark of creativity.
Now the consensus seems to be that it's a Chinese mind-control tool and it represents everything the misanthropes here hate about modern culture, the web and the generations that participate in it.
It seems to be exactly the same generational impulse as our parents railing against the "boob tube" and "devil music" or (to quote RMS) "(c)rap music." Although they weren't entirely wrong they weren't nearly as correct as they insisted they were. I suspect the same is true about the current moral panic around social media, and TikTok in general. Yes there are legitimate concerns, but it isn't the ontological evil people make it out to be either. It isn't actually controlling people's minds. It isn't actually more addictive than heroin.
And to answer NiloCK without another comment, what's worse will be "TikTok but everything is AI generated by the platform itself." Say what you will about TikTok, at least a lot of it is still human expression.
> Now the consensus seems to be that it's a Chinese mind-control tool and it represents everything the misanthropes here hate about modern culture, the web and the generations that participate in it.
If you drop the word "Chinese" and "misanthrope" I'm in board with your description.
For me the difference is exactly what the article is about. TikTok was the first to abandon even a pretense of being about communication and became all about content. Facebook and IG have went the same way and are barely better these days, but TikTok exemplifies the trend
> For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
So your argument is centrally controlled and edited distribution of news information is superior?
I was born in 82, and news has been largely rubbish in almost all forms. Heavily biased by the editors/owners, things missing, weird focuses. The 1940s was filled with propaganda and newspapers were owned by a few moguls or by fascist governments.
At least with the uncensored internet it's possible to educate yourself. There is plenty of amazing journalism if you look around. Including on Tik Tok!
Yep. I remember my dad quoting some major news anchor as saying, “My job isn’t to report the news; it’s to shape perception.” Or something like that. I started watching the news with that as my lens, and it seems to be an axiom of the entire industry. I never have managed to find a reliable way to filter the signal from the noise, other than watching / reading the direct sources (CSPAN or whatnot). No one has time for that.
I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight:
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
We are destroying ourselves; the very core of what it is to be human. I say this acknowledging the irony of writing this on my phone, on a Sunday morning, when I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.
Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.
Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.
Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!
> When I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think you need to couple "offline interaction" with this criticism. As a neurodivergent person in more than one way I appreciate being able to interact with people that face similar challenges to me and understand me. The problem is that social media is increasingly designed to not facilitate that, but content distribution.
Yeah. Let's not fetishize "real world". Offline space is often boring and most people suck. There's a reason why we prefer to be looking at the screens. Having said that, I think that it makes sense to be more cautious about screen time and interact more with the offline space. Not because offline space is better, but because our brains are fried and they peceive online space to be better than it really is, we're literal addicts. I'm trying to teach myself that it's okay to be bored.
I guess when enough people get addicted to something, it's no longer considered to be an addiction.
When I am people watching, sometimes I am reminded of the TNG episode of star trek where everyone gets addicted to a game. Non-players grow concerned until they all succumb.
I've read that short story, but can't remember enough details to search for it.
Humans do find alien radio signals, but they keep going dark after a brief window; the narrator suspects why, because they witness fellow humans disappearing into simulations far more fun than reality could ever be.
Not quite the same concept, but The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (published in 1909, but still pretty relevant imo) is about where this all might lead, with humans living in almost total isolation and only communicating through "the machine", which mostly sounds like modern social media lol. It's terrifying. Also really demonstrates how static human nature actually is.
The Great Filter is just bullshit until we come across space ruins to prove that something has been filtering out civilizations. It is possible that we are just the "precursors" without any giants to stand upon the shoulders of.
Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
Being a precursor is not inconsistent with great filters, a great filter is why nobody else is there to be one.
Great filter is anywhere at all in the progress of life from pre-life chemistry to stable interplanetary expansion; filters behind us, for example multicellular life or having dry land so we can invent fire, are still potential great filters and they would leave no space ruins to find.
That said, my assumption is lots of little filters that add up. Eleven filters behind us each with 10% pass rates is enough to make us the peak of civilisation in this galaxy; eleven more between us and Kardashev III would make the universe seem empty.
"Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?"
The jury is still out on that one... failed "business" person who was also a "reality TV star" - and now appears to be in some level of dementia - currently in charge of the single biggest military-industrial complex on the planet...
Is there any evidence that the fall in birth rates is caused by humans having produced reality TV shows?
I’d say there is better evidence to suggest the fall in birth rates is predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children, and enabling the invention of the single mother who survives on government largesse. Separating church and state appears to be contributing at least to some extent.
Single mothers, and women having their first child in their late 20’s or 30’s, appear to be maladaptive.
> predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children
Who is “telling them that”? Society by allowing them to open a checking account? Women’s suffrage? The reality is that other than the most privileged, a modern family can’t afford to function without both parents working. I assume you’re for raising the minimum wage to allow a family to run on a single income with multiple children? Or your solution is to send us back to the dark ages and remove womens rights?
> enabling the invention of the single mother who survives on government largesse.
There’s literally nobody who has kids as a single mother with the goal of raising them on welfare, that might be the single most ridiculous statement in this thread.
> Separating church and state appears to be contributing at least to some extent.
The Russian Orthodox Church is government sponsored. How’s their birth rate going?
It's definitely not true that both parents need to work. I know many families where only one parent has an income, and it is a very low income (one works as a mover for example) and they manage to eat and live etc.
Do they live upper middle class on this income? No. But they do live and have multiple children.
And I can guarantee they’re on government assistance because I know what a “mover” makes, and I know what diapers and formula cost, and they aren’t paying for multiple children on that salary alone.
I can promise you they are not. One of the families in question doesn't even get their tax credits because they are too far behind on filing. It's just the mover income. They have to make it work and since they must, they do
They don't buy formula obviously and they cloth diaper with used stuff from marketplace. To cover the two examples you gave
I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs. I never found it all that funny given that it was a reality for my family.
Yes, we should all aspire to have our children's mother at home during the child's developmental years rather than letting it be a string of minimum-wage strangers. If you can't manage that, oh well, it happens... but that's the ideal that we should all want. And wouldn't it be a hell of a world, where the single income could support such a family?
>I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs.
Someone above asked "who was telling them X". Well, in your case, it was 90s sitcoms. Not just your case, everyone's really. Sitcoms have been used to negatively portray what should be ideals since at least the 1970s.
Maybe think for a second from the perspective of a couple or woman who WANT to have children. The problems they face in today's economy where both people need to work full-time just to survive are huge, and it seems even crazier to add the time and money costs of a child, let alone several.
The way to change all of that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with economic and labor policy
Society decided it was OK to have the top 1% control 27% or all wealth and the top 10% control 60%, and allow companies to pay wages so low that a person working full-time cannot even get out of poverty, so 25%+ of the workers at the largest employer qualify for food benefits (and the employer even gives employees seminars how to get benefits), while the leaders/owners of those companies rake in more billions every year.
Society decided it was OK to make sure health care is expensive, incomplete, and bankrupting for any unexpected event.
Society decided it was the mothers who are responsible for all childcare and provide only minimum assistance for critical needs like prenatal care, and day-care.
You want more babies? Make just a few changes
Change requirements so corporations are required to compensate their employees merely the way the original US minimum wage was specified (including in the 1956 Republican Party Platform): So a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education. Recognize that the companies trying to exploit their workers by paying less so their full-time employees need govt benefits to feed themselves are the ones exploiting welfare, and do not have a viable business model, they have an exploitation model.
Add making healthcare sufficient and affordable for all, including children and support for daycare and the time and effort to raise children.
Change those things, and instead of a couple looking at making an already hugely insecure future even more insecure by having children, they would see an opportunity to confidently embark on building a family without feeling like one misfortune or layoff could put them all in the street.
Do you have a citation that the US federal minimium wage ever had the objective that "a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four" because I can't find it in the Wikipedia entry[1] or other top level search results. I also don't see this idea in the 1956 Republican Party platform[2]. At best from reading a few other sources it looks like at its peak in the late 1960s it would have been enough to keep a family of three above the poverty line (though that hardly implies they could afford a mortgage and higher education).
> a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Yes, there will likely be that phenomenon, but will it occur faster than the approx 2% level of optimum inflation?
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
Money has been shown convincingly to not be an important factor. Please read about it for a while and you will quickly see that it’s a discredited argument, not least because poor people everywhere have always had more children. Also, fertility rates are falling everywhere, especially in countries that are becoming wealthier.
Perhaps money alone is not a reliable factor, and there are certainly confounding variables, such as poor people having low access to healthcare including contraception and education about options and how to use it.
More important than money is economic security, the ability to expect a reasonable long-term access to a sound source of income.
Having to worry whether you'll be laid off next week and not be able to get new work, and have that worry be constant over a decade is a real discouragement to having children.
Having a stable situation in life is vastly underrated, and not easily measured by current net worth or income.
> Money not infertility, UN report says: Why birth rates are plummeting
> Roughly 40 percent of respondents cited economic barriers – such as the costs of raising children, job insecurity and expensive housing – as the main reason for having fewer children than they would like
That’s what I am saying: this is just utter bullshit that almost every other study disproves, as well as a quick check of the reality around the world! Hence why I suggested to read more on the topic.
Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior. People almost always say what they think is right not what they really feel. I suspect a lot of people don’t have kids because they are afraid of having ugly or stupid or sick children… would you say it out loud if that was the case for you? I am sure you would not and you would rationalize it as being about money somehow.
> Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior
1) The surveys are designed to figure out these things
2) Even if the surveys are not, the shift y-o-y, from previous statements, providing trend data. Respondents can always choose different masking reasons for their choices. Pricing becoming a standout reason speaks volumes.,
3) If you reject both those points, you can postulate any theory you like, and there will never been current data to back it up. At this point we can assume any reason, as a matter of preference not as a matter of fact.
>Is there any evidence that the fall in birth rates is caused by humans having produced reality TV shows?
No, but there's is evidence that the fall in birth rates is affected by all the content slop people spend their times consuming instead of talking to one another and fucking one another... and the ideas that slop puts into their heads are even worse...
Doesn't it? TV got mass adoption midpoint around 1955 - around which time when the fertility trends start sloping down (and incidentaly around the time Putnam puts the start of the decline in social capital in the US in the seminal "Bowling Alone").
It then stabilizes around 1980 and starts a second downward slop around 2010 - the time of smartphones and social media.
> I’d say there is better evidence to suggest the fall in birth rates is predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children
I'd say the evidence is inconclusive and could just as easily be explained by not telling men they needed to take on their share of the burden at home now that their women were no longer trapped at home doing unpaid, manual labor all day.
Instead, we're letting people say "gay sex includes giving a woman an orgasm instead of a pregnancy" (an actual thing I've heard a right-wing influencer say right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH6uydPCX8Q ) and encouraging men to be more selfish and anti-woman.
Also who cares about a fall in birth rates? We need a fall in birth rates. Above replacement rate is mathematically unstable in the long term.
When people complain bout "a fall in birth rates," they're a mix of capitalists who need their profits to ever increase, and white supremacists who mean WHITE people need to have more babies because society is too BROWN now.
We're about to have hella unemployment from too many people for too few jobs. We need fewer people.
Your post, youtube link and quote is quite ironic given the title of this thread.
You link to a youtube podcast of kids stating things as if they are facts, its just a podcast. I've never heard these things actually said anywhere. It means nothing.
Then your quote is taken out of context and a new culture war is created, well done.
It's interesting how common the theme of "a man being into women is gay" is among the right-wing circles, though usually it's hidden in the subtext and not just spelled out in clear like this.
Yes I'm sure reality TV did it and not cost of living meaning they have little money for entertainment and definitely will never purchase their own home.
If "will never purchase their own home" was a reason to not have kids, many more people in previous generations would've been childless.
What has changed is expectations. The room I rented in my final year of university, and that was only 20 years ago, would (I think) no longer be legal: too poorly insulated. Very cheap though, I think it was £40 a week? Even after adjusting that for inflation since then, that was cheap. But it's (I think?) no longer possible.
Expectations for things that can be bought have gone up faster than our ability to buy them. We didn't used to all expect to be able to fly somewhere on holiday. We didn't used to all expect to have a phone — and I don't just mean a smartphone, or even a mobile phone, my first partner was a bit older than me, born in the 70s, their family didn't have a landline. All the streaming services are expensive, I grew up with 4 free-to-air channels and no internet (not even a dialup modem) let alone broadband that you need to stream video, no cable TV or satellite TV. Smart bulbs for mood lighting can quickly become expensive, I grew up in an upper middle class house and yet it had one, singular, dimming switch for the incandescent bulb it took. A microwave was a fancy accessory, not standard, when I was a kid. It all adds up.
Also, our expectations for relationships have gone up faster than humans could ever change, as our expectations follow not reality but rather perception. Sure, the perception was already off when I was young, we had unrealistic body goals in high-gloss magazines and Hollywood glamour and unrealistic romances in stories and unrealistic sex in porn, but even with that the quantity one could consume was relatively limited… and now we have the highest-rated content from our always-on social media accounts, A/B tested to be more appealing than reality, and even when it isn't AI-enhanced or photoshopped, it's still the final cut to the cutting room floor of having to deal with flawed real people.
Yes, college aged men who aren’t in a relationship are avoiding pursuing one because they’re thinking about whether or not they’ll be able to afford a house some day. It definitely has nothing to do with social media and dating apps breaking human interaction.
>Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
And it was. We're now even further down in that downfall, and most content is "reality TV" style now: influencers, parasocial relationships, IG, TikTok, OF, news vlogs and podcasts that are about the anchor an not the content, and so on...
i don't know much but 90% of medical advice is basically, drop modern life on a regular basis (walk, stay outside, hug, lift, touch, eat raw, eat few)..
it would be weird if the complex biosphere environment that made our ancestor struggle was also a key balancer that we can't replace
The "eat raw" part seems at least partially misguided, since our ancestors apparently started cooking the heck out of their environment pretty early, didn't consume much unprocessed dairy until very late, and the raw food they did consume tended to carry less pathogens than modern mass-produced food.
The greatest part of the rest, however, appears to be true. I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not. Low-processed food makes my digestive system measurably happier, walking lots makes me unreasonably healthier, being among trees and mountains calms me to a crazy degree.
But then we did spend like 98% of our evolutionary history since the last big speciation event as hunter-gatherers, and we gotta be as adapted to that as any critter is to their lifestyle.
At this point I kind of expect to find perversions the social patterns and structures of hunter-gatherer groups embedded in the dark patterns that make social media so insidious, much like exploiting our built-in craving for scarce energy-dense nutrition made Coca Cola etc. the economic giants they are. I just don't know enough about the social structures of the deep past to spot these things yet. There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature on that either, so I'm not sure how I'll get there, but I'd like to.
> I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not.
I'm lacking words to describe how I feel reading the same comment from many people online. I too felt weird seeing how much more peaceful and healthier simple bike commute made me. I remember coming home sweaty and running across angry car drivers pissed to wait for 3 seconds more than necessary in the comfort of their seat, while me doing all these efforts .. all calm, even joyful.
Same for food, it's hard to unplug from all sweet processed food, but after a month you realize your body doesn't need it. less but better food, helps sleep too..
Totally agree regarding biking, walking, trees, mountains, and will add lakes.
Though it does only lightly touch on social structures of traditional societies, you may enjoy reading "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter" by Joseph Henrich. I also found classic texts of social and political anthropology to be very worthwhile for understanding human societies. Ted Lewellen's "Political Anthropology: An Introduction" is a good starting point.
Cooked food is easier to digest. The discovery of cooking is what allowed early hominids to grow larger brains (which have higher calorie demands) and become modern humans.
Hey now... We have to evolve somehow. The folks that continue to reproduce in this technological dystopia are passing on their "just ignore social media" (or more likely, "get bored with social media") genes to the next generation.
In a 1000 years, social media will recommend people stop spending time outdoors and warn against the dangers of non-ultraprocessed food.
Power outages at places where young people are forced to gather will be engineered in order to facilitate breeding as their minds will be completely starved of anything else to do while their hormones rage due to the aphrodisiac aerosols pumped into the building where they remain captive.
Nothing has been conquered. Technology is providing a behavioral selection process that is effectively self-culling the populace and is going to make the mass adaptation to the next century of climate change much more bearable for all
we have certainly conquered caloric density, reducing individual caloric expenditure, and eliminating environmental hazards (though it's not evenly distributed) to the point where pockets of the population are dangerously sedentary and overfed (and thus life expectancy is declining from a previous peak)
You are being downvoted, but I am wondering if people, who are doing it are doing it reflexively just because they disagree and not because they thought it through. There is an argment to be made that there is a level of self-preservation that disappears when things become too sanitized. Case in point, during one of FL issues, people were panicking over gas and -- some -- were putting gas in unapproved containers without giving much thought over whether it is a good idea since gas can do a lot more than just power cars. Granted, some of the silly behavior is a direct result of social media egg ons/clout chase and weird level Tyler Durden accellerationist vibes, but some people simply don't know.. or care to know.
I am not saying it is a good thing, but there is something to be said about current distracted humans operating internal combustion engine. Then again, my dad already told me it is all going to hell, because I can't change oil...
No, our nature is to satiate our dopamine system. That system evolved to keep us fed, nourished, and to make us make friends and belong and have sex to make more humans. The problem is that we are now so smart and clever that we can start learning how the dopamine system works and hacking it.
This isn't new. We've been doing it for a long time with booze, porn, drugs, sexual excess, gambling, pointless consumerism, certain kinds of religious fervor, endless things.
But almost all of those things are self-limiting. They're either costly, dangerous, in limited supply, or physically harmful enough to our health that we shy away from them and taboos develop around them.
Addictive digital media may actually be more dangerous than those things precisely because it is cheap, always available, endless, and physically harmless. As a result it has no built-in mechanism that limits it. We can scroll and scroll and chase social media feedback loops forever until we die.
AI slop feeds are going to supercharge this even more. Instead of human creators we will have AI models that can work off immediate engagement feedback and fine tune themselves for each individual user in real time. I'm quite certain all the antisocial media companies are working on this right now. Won't be long before they start explicitly removing human creators from the loop and just generating endless customized chum with ad placement embedded into it.
Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not either for psychological/neurological reasons or because they are exhausted and stressed and unable to summon the energy. Humans do not have infinite willpower. So I've been predicting for a while that eventually we're going to heavily regulate or tax this space.
This concerns me too due to the free speech implications and the general risk of overreacting and overcorrecting. It'll be tempting for politicians to regulate or tax only the platforms they don't like, or to use the regulatory mechanism to crack down on legitimate speech by grouping it in with addictive chum. We've seen similar things with attempts to regulate porn or hate speech. But it's coming. I have little doubt. I think we'll see this when GenZ and GenA start entering politics.
It's really still shocking to me. If you went back in time and told me in, say, 2006, that our engagement-hacking would be so successful that it became an X-risk to humanity, I'm not sure I'd believe you. I never would have believed how effective this stuff could be. It's just a damn screen for god's sake! I think a lot of people are still in denial about this problem because it seems so absurd that a touch screen can addict people as well as fentanyl, but it's true. I see it around me all the time.
Edit:
My preferred way to go about reeling this back in would be to strike at the root and start taxing advertising the way we tax booze, drugs, gambling, and other vices. Advertising revenue is the trunk of this tree. The entire reason these systems are created is to keep people staring so ads can be pushed at them. Take that away and a lot of the motive to build and run these things goes away.
Another, which we're already seeing, is to age-restrict antisocial media. Young minds are particularly vulnerable to these tactics, more so than adults, and all addiction pushers try to addict people early.
Lastly, we could start campaigns to educate people. We need schools teaching classes explaining to kids how these systems addict and manipulate them and why, and public PSAs to the same effect. It needs to be treated like a health issue because it is.
Taxes, education, and age restriction is how we almost killed cigarettes in the USA, so there is precedent for these three things together working.
We also need to be a lot more precise in our language. The problem is not the Internet, phones, computers, "tech," AI, etc. The problem is engineering systems for engagement, specifically. If you are trying to design a system to keep people staring at a screen (or other interface) for as much time as possible, you are hurting people. What you're doing is in the same category as what the Sackler family did with oxycontin. Engagement engineering is a predatory destructive practice and the people who do it are predators. I think it's taken a long time for people to realize this because, again, it's just a damn screen! It's shocking that this is so effective that we need to have this societal conversation.
I don’t have anything to add, but just wanted to thank you for this insightful and deeply thought out response. The solutions you list do look like they would work and I hope we find the political will, sooner rather than later.
Patrick Boyle eventually comes to a similar conclusion in his video about global population decline - https://youtu.be/ispyUPqqL1c?si=7jUgVBkOvLHluPAR - but includes lots of graphs and other interesting factlets.
* warning for Americans: not suitable for those offended by sarcasm
I agree that advertising is the root of it, but some people might still pay for modern social media. They used to pay for porn, before it was available for "free" (ad supported). Some still do. I pay for YouTube to avoid the ads. I don't think I would pay for Facebook or Tiktok though. Possibly an uninformed opinion as I've never used those platforms.
Paid media is better. If you pay for a monthly subscription or for individual pieces of media, revenue is no longer tied to “engagement.” If you pay for Netflix and watch three hours a month or thirty, it makes little difference.
Ads tie revenue directly to time spent on the screen, and that is the root of all evil.
As another poster mentioned, ad revenue is often higher than what you can reasonably get with subscriptions. That’s where taxing advertising would help.
There's no way to reel it back. You said it here though:
> Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not
This is simply a genetic selective filter that will destroy some people while others make it through, and there will need to be an overall adaptation against finding fake slop debilitatingly addictive. Like drugs, alcohol, porn, food, opiates, etc and other things some can resist and are able to abstain while some can't. I used to worry so much about these things in aggregate but I realized it's too pervasive to eliminate and impossible to change people's nature when it comes to resisting it or even worrying about it as a problem to avoid, so simply resisting better than others and having children that hopefully are able to overcome and avoid by way of finding more value in real experiences is the only successful outcome.
If one has to really really think hard about and try really really hard to overcome, then they're probably just not going to make it... and we all know for many people avoiding addictions comes easy. This chasm of reaction to stimulus means there will be divergent outcomes. It can't be any other way.
This is provably wrong. Preventative public health measures against for instance cigarettes and nicotine reduce uptake, reduce consumption and increase quitting. [1] In the case of smoking, this also cut second-hand harm/death from smoking. Similarly, preventative measures have first order and second order benefits for alcohol and other drug consumption.
Just giving up on those who show higher likelihood for addiction is a travesty. Failure to eliminate an addiction is no reason to give up reducing its harms, both to the person themselves, family and friends, and wider society.
It appears that the current content systems have some correlation in lowering the fertility rate; in that case they will be self-limiting after all, just not in the way OP mentioned about the other vices. It will be interesting indeed how things look after a generation or two.
This seems ridiculously fatalistic and weirdly binary way of looking at things. Best I can start with is 'why?', because to a simple person like me it could be any number of ways..
My hypothesis is: Humans are social and need social interaction to thrive. However we are not wired for the diversity of interacting with 7 Billion people and all the derivatives.
We thrive in small groups where there is high trust social networks and generally being around people with the same culture and belief system.
But humans don't, in any meaningful sense, interact with 7 billion people when they use social media any more than they interact with the entire population of their city whenever they go out. And most people living in any reasonably sized city - to use that as a real world analogue for social media - aren't only interacting with small, high trust social networks of the same culture and beliefs, and they manage just fine.
Your hypothesis (which seems more and more common) seems to me to be a "just so" story, but it doesn't correlate with what I've observed of real human behavior.
1) People choose to live in the same city so they have that in common
2) 7B don't all interact together, thats not the point. The point is that its random who you talk to as most social media is anonymous.
Combine this and you have low trust + low chance of having similar viewpoints/culture/beliefs.
Manage just fine does not mean everyone is happy, and in these major areas like NYC people always seem to congregate with the groups they share the most in commong with.
> so much content, it can keep me continually engaged
I find the total opposite to be true. I desperately want more engaging content to feed the gooey goblin in my brain but the overwhelming majority doesn't cut it and this was before AI.
Almost every show I see on netflix, tiktok I glance at, or reddit post is absolute unflavored mash potatoes. Content for content's sake. Feed me more content like scavengers reign and less frankenstein remakes or super hero slop.
Also, we might have become spoiled by having found content that aligns with our interests at all. Like an Overton window, we have been slowly realigning our desires to expect better and even better content.
We truly might be addicted and are slowly becoming unsatisfied with the simpler, more nuanced pleasures in life.
There's way more good content available than an employed adult human has time to consume. I have watched five great seasons of TV this year (Frieren, Apothecary Diaries, Dandadan, Blue Box, Stranger Things, all on Netflix) and zero movies (no time with kids!), and have read twelve good books (ranging from prize-winning literature to incredible graphic novels). I have zero time for anything else besides two other hobbies, both of which involve the creative act: coding, and writing fanfiction.
When I hear "there's nothing good available," I assume the person is a dullard. Like where are you looking that you can't throw a rock and hit something worth watching?!
One reason I enjoy anime as much as I do is because most of these stories are written by a single person with maybe an assistant or two and an editor, they're not designed by committee.
I somewhat enjoy Stranger Things but it's falling into the space where I can write the next line of dialog in my head for whole scenes. Whereas it started out poking fun at tropes like doing exposition or relationship development at moments of maximum danger it's turned into a long sequence of Obligatory Scenes that feel increasingly forced.
> a long sequence of Obligatory Scenes that feel increasingly forced
You're describing mainstream entertainment in general. I started noticing this with the storyboard-as-film, action-by-numbers "Raider's of the Lost Ark". (I won't even waste my time on super hero films.)
It blows my mind that anyone can consider Stranger Things to be great anything. It's utter dross. It's like our standards have dropped massively over the last 50 years in almost every way, in literature, music, journalism, politics, movies, and TV.
Maybe the problem is that you're looking for content to consume, instead of art to enjoy and participate with. The distinction is important because how you frame a problem changes how you solve it.
Very often misquoted as being a blunt attack on religion, but people often just cut out the second half of the quote --
"opiate of the masses... heart of the heartless world"
Marx was despairing at the heartlessness of the condition of working class people in industrial slums, people one generation or less removed from the flight from rural landless dispossession and starvation into the polluted cities and factories and tiny apartments in slums in search of survival. He saw religion as one tool people used to salve the pain, to reduce the suffering.
Far more complicated than "religion bad, we should ban it, mmkay"
There's probably an analogy here around the "attention economy" and "social media."
Look for root causes. If you turn everything and everyone into a commodity -- "market yourself!" -- don't be surprised when the consumptive model takes over all consciousness.
The commodity form is the [post|hyper]modern religion.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed with a measure of a restraint. It needs to be clear we can be reasoned with.
So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
Dump advertising into the ocean. The motivation for maximizing engagement on social media is to maximize ad impressions for revenue. Every algorithm, every dark pattern, every UX tweak, is aimed toward that sole end. The issue cannot be fixed by regulating social media itself; it is the enormous monetary incentive that is the root of the problem and until the flow of money is choked off, corporations will still doggedly pursue that revenue.
So what exactly are you proposing - that we encourage all users to only pay for ad-free versions of every service they use, instead of choosing an ad-supported version? Try to outlaw adverting globally? What is an ad - a sign for a company? A company’s circular? A sign for company with a logo next to it? (To understand what should be forbidden.)
> every algorithm … every UX tweak
Actually, is the whole comment sarcasm? Or is the proposal to ban algorithms/UX changes? Or just such things if they increase sales on a product page, etc?
Hmm, how about taxing ad impressions per user, per social media site, per day on an increasing scale? It remains possible for a social media site to remain profitable but makes it rapidly unprofitable to show too many ads. It also incentivizes the social media site to push the user toward paid service with no ads that can be more profitable than the maximum number of ads they are allowed to spew at free users.
A good start would be to make it a criminal offence to sell the right to execute code on somebody's device without their consent. And to tax into oblivion any service that can't function without such consent.
We can work our way up to eliminating all targeted advertising later, lets start with the stuff that's indistinguishable from malware.
I don't think history is on your side there. Disengagement might be a small first step, but for no rebellion worth mentioning was disengagement in any way ultimate.
Rebellion is about stripping people of power. The disengagement you're describing, if not followed up by a different sort of reengagement, would merely be getting out of the power's way.
I'd love to lobby for "the right" to opt out of AI features.
When I google search "why is the sky blue" , it spins up an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful for simple, known answers.
When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again. Google was a pioneer of search indexing, and now it seems like we don't attempt to index answers at all. They're spinning up an LLM every time because they're trying to run up the AI "adoption" metrics.
I'd love to be able to ask for simple things, like the address of the local restaurant 3 blocks away, without firing up a GPU in an AI data center.
I don't always want to "talk with" a computer. Sometimes I just want to "use" a computer. Maybe that makes me a fool. Or an old man yelling at clouds.
> When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again
I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states.
Got the exact same answer.
These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.
> 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”
Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media.
If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
<< Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.
Interesting point, because Hacker News doesn't serve ads, and doesn't have any personalized algorithms, yet it's quite compelling and I waste a lot of time here.
Is the problem really social media though? Without some kind of long-distance-capable social medium that we participate in directly, how are we going to know when the news is lying to us? Social media's alternatives also can't resist corruption, if we give up this fight, we'll lose that one too.
I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.
Capital P proof is great if you want to know whether a topological space is separable, but if you want to know if you should stop paying your taxes because maybe they're causing more harm than good then you're going to have to rely on something besides capital P proof. You're going to have to rely on induction and probability. More vs less data matters quite a bit in such places.
Sources can include people you've never met, have no reason to lie, and happened to be in an opportune position to contribute to the sort of lowercase p proofs that you need.
If we can fix social media there can be many such people. If not, there will be necessarily fewer, and they'll have to be replaced by people for whom addressing the public with new information is their job. The latter sort are high value targets for corruption. As long as they're worried about keeping that job, they have to also worry about who they upset with their information. You're necessarily going to get weaker lowercase-p proofs from such people.
That's not to say that we'll have no tools for keeping power in check, but we will have fewer, which means their abuses will be more frequent and more severe.
I have given an example of something that I can prove, and you have failed to "easily" disprove it. Disappointing given the cockiness of your challenge.
And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)
The challenge was not that you prove it to yourself, Mr. Descartes. It was that you prove it to bdangpublic. It doesn't look like you've done so to me.
You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".
That's moving the goalpost. The challenge was not to prove it to them, but to give an example of a provable thing, them claiming they would be easily able to prove the negative(or to prove that I cannot prove it? The wording is ambigous).
Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun.
But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.
It is in the distant future still (if we ever get there without apocalypse first) but I think the goal was set out to be, from the very first bits of digital data, is to completely transition ourselves to a digital world. Living it in parallel will make less sense if Earth conditions get worse, and even less in space or on a hostile planet. In a digital world possibilities become limitless, disabilities, distances, shortcomings of the mind eliminated. Once you can't see a difference, will it matter if something is "real"? Sure, it can also become a hell and inhumane much easier, but this doesn't make it a less compelling dimension.
Looking through this lens, fighting, limiting internet usage is akin to moving to the rainforest to avoid capitalism - lone rebelling acts in the wrong direction of history, a temporary, partial victory for the few who dare this hassle.
Time is better spent to make this emerging space better, for everyone.
It has been well theorized by A. Dugin :
Wére now in the era of full realization / triumph of postmodernity. After having crushed all its 20th-century adversaries, western liberalism and its ideology of universal 'progress' will destroy everything that makes us truly human
Dugin? That anti-scientific maniac? He is no different to some Western liberals equally hating hormones' influences into different genders down to orientation methods. And, yes, that means there's a spectrum, but no one can't deny these differences.
We’ve started instituting a “no phones” policy when the kids have sleepovers to try to combat this at least a little bit, and have constant conversations about why things like Instagram are toxic and we should just try to spend our time enjoying life.
Obviously I’m also posting here while I wait in the car waiting to pick someone up, but I actively make an effort to unplug on a regular basis.
> isn't HN more like professional news/discussion place?
I see enough racist and misogynist comments here to know that isn't true. And that's not even considering the low-knowledge comments offered up as expertise.
I long for the days of a Slashdot where you could filter out anyone with a UID greater than 200K or so, and it'd be nothing but 20yr experts in IT dropping rugged after rugged of tremendously insightful analysis. (Granted there was also plenty of GNAA frist psot stuff.)
>I long for the days of a Slashdot where you could filter out anyone with a UID greater than 200K or so, and it'd be nothing but 20yr experts in IT dropping rugged after rugged of tremendously insightful analysis.
If you had a similar filter here it'd likely have the the opposite effect.
The lack of subreddits is a big difference because it inhibits users coagulating into subgroups. Reddit also allows people to be banned from subreddits by subreddit owners/mods which leads to groupthink more.
HN is definitely social media, even if it isn't explicitly labeled as such. Ostensibly Instagram is just a photo sharing site, but we all know it is social media.
I think in 12 months we're not going to know the difference unless we put in some serious effort. I use AI quite a lot and it's great, but don't like it for 'media' in general. Personally, I don't want to support AI generated audio, video, or text content. This past week I came across an Instagram account, found it interesting and followed it. Admittedly it was some high-level cookie cutter self-help stuff. Easy to catch your attention. Eventually I dug into it a bit more and it was 100% AI generated. I'd missed it completely and there were no comments suggesting it was AI content either despite over 1m followers. If you want to be sure the media you are viewing is actually created by real people, algorithmic feeds are no longer an option. It will be interesting to see over the next year or two whether there is a large backlash and people start seeking out content they are positive is created by real people, or if that becomes a subculture and the masses are happy with their circus.
Maybe. I am saying this not to be contrarian, but I am seeing a rather specific pattern in some areas. Chatgpt used to be pretty decent in cross thread musings, but those got capped hard to the point that even wide recall invocation does not always work as intended. And that change wasn't just about resources. Similar stuff seems to be happening with various lawsuits on the 'creative' side.
All this makes me thing that while the capability may be there for those who want it, openly accessible stuff will be heavily nerfed. You know, just like now.
You jest, but I would it if my AI agent suggested, "How about a book to read? Stay off the internet for a week—I picked up a used book on eBay for you that I think you'll enjoy. Don't worry, I paid for it by doing a little trading on the side."
Once you see social media as an attention-extraction machine rather than a communication system, outsourcing creation to users starts to look like a temporary optimization, not the end state
> is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.
In high school English class we had to present a "poem" of our choice, of any sort - which included music pieces (or whatever other format). The song you quoted (KMFDM - Dogma) was my choice. The assignment included handing out the poem and reading (or playing it) to the class... Uhh, needless to say this got a pretty interesting reaction, but to the credit of the teacher, she didn't stop the music (or confiscate the printed out lyrics I handed out to everyone) despite the various swear words and pretty interesting messages in the lyrics.
> Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume?
The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.
Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.
By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.
AI achieves many things for these platforms:
1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)
2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)
3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers
4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections
>> The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising.
This just isn't true. There was a time when we had a chronological feed, only containing content from friends and family, and no advertising. The business model end goal was always advertising but social media doesn't necessarily need to be for that purpose (e.g. the fediverse).
Well, I'd be careful about the "always", when Facebook and Twitter started out they understood virality but they did not understand monetization -- early on the likes of Zynga and King were making money off Facebook and it wasn't until Facebook was forced to go public and Sheryl Sandberg was running things that they figured out that they could capture the free publicity brands got on Facebook and sell it back to them.
> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly."
When most of what a user can do can be done from one single UI, the low friction will win.
And since all the data must be sent to the service, and that a super intelligent AI analysis all this data, the spying that is already considered outrageous today will reach unprecedented level.
Now, associate that with the fact the last year people in charge of said systems kissed the ring of the power that be in the most disgusting way. Add what we learned about surveillance from 3 letters agency.
You get your dystopia. It's not an if now. It's a when.
We need to solve that problem now. Once we hit it, we will lose the ability to solve it.
And I'm not sure where you could go on earth to escape it.
Nor should you, digitally. Each ideation we have of how it can be further used to break our civil rights, is being used as a playbook to do exactly that. Warn your friends in person, but don't give the basilisk a free lunch.
>Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive.
>That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform.
Easily the best post on HN so far this year 2025, thanks.
Very messy situations that we're at the moment for our communications platform but sadly it's true.
> We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0."
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators.
Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult.
The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.
I think federation is interesting as a concept, but my time with Mastodon has revealed that even decentralized networks are just as full of outrage-centric entertainment and ragebait as the main networks.
I think “the algorithm” gets a lot of blame for mirroring the choices that people are making for themselves. Even when you remove any semblance of an algorithm people have no problem creating their own little worlds of outrage entertainment and rage bait.
I'm old enough to have been on the internet before social networks, back in the days of forums / bulletin boards. Even then there was always a new drama in the community. I feel it's human nature.
I agree with you, and with GP for that matter, I think this is both human nature AND we've been conditioned by algorithms to seek and produce this style of communication. I'm really hopeful we can eventually grow out of this.
I feel terrible for the kids currently growing up with tiktok, Instagram & al., I only hope we will build the social and legal framework to safeguard the next generations from this, until they reach a certain age at least.
Yeah, I think the article conflated a few points: I think the issue the author was having was that he thought that decentralized social networks were meant to be decentralized communication platforms, when they were meant to be decentralized content delivery platforms.
The problem isn't the decentralization, it's the choice of a goal. However, email, IRC, Matrix, etc all already exist, and are what the author wants, so I do see tbe article as a bit misguided.
I think what the author meant to say was "I thought ActivityPub was meant to be more like Matrix, but it's not, and I'm sad about that".
How? I don't even think decentralized is the appropriate term. They're distributed entertainment platforms in that they're protocol based, but regarding the distribution of content there's nothing in it that decentralizes reach. The social graph of Twitter and Mastodon could in principle be identical.
Malicious actors don't need to control algorithms. States running influence campaigns on say, Youtube or Facebook don't actually control any algorithm, they adapt their content to what does well on the platform. And they could equally do this, one could argue even more effectively, on the fediverse.
Saying the Fediverse solves top down influence is like thinking that Bitcoin solves wealth inequality. The distribution of the network is completely agnostic to the centralization of the content.
Each server on a federated platform has control over how content retrieved through ActivityPub is delivered to its users. A healthy federated network allows competitions between "algorithms" for the same content. The social graph can be identical, but how it's traversed differs.
Think about how platforms have algorithmic comment ranking now, where two users who open the same comment section can see different top comments. This is a corporation or state (think tiktok) directly influencing how someone sees what their community thinks.
> This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.
I'm curious if this message is new to many here?
What makes it feel "dramatic"? I get the impression people say something is "dramatic" when it doesn't really land or connect? Because when something punches me in the gut, I don't say "that was dramatic", I say "that was compelling".
I'm over 40, and these kinds of concerns (technology serving people's deeper needs rather than serving them up fleeting entertainment) has been on my radar for 15+ years. Back then, I was expecting to go into public administration, policy analysis, or "technology for good" to use what might be a naive phrase.
I've noticed a funny tendency among some Fediverse passionates to have strong feelings about how others should be using it. Author says "We could not both be right," but that's rather antithetical to the value proposition of decentralized social media, IMO.
A healthy user-empowered ecosystem naturally has some fragmentation; that's a sign it's working as it should to accommodate different tastes and visions. You can't use the same metrics for judging monolothic systems driven by a central authority as decentralized ones.
I share many of the author's opinions on communication vs entertainment, but the framing around an intentionally open and flexible system like ActivityPub leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you.
The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.
It's more like Usenet users complaining that NZB downloaders don't let their users read text posts. Nobody using an NZB downloader gives a fuck about text posts. They're not there to chat with their fellow humans, they're there to download files. Both the text posts and binary files are transmitted by the same substrate, NNTP, but the protocol clearly has multiple groups of people using it for very different purposes.
Comparing it to email is inappropriate, because email is addressed to you, and you get upset if email servers/clients drop emails. But newsfeeds are not addressed to you. Neither is RSS/Atom. ActivityPub, generally speaking, isn't either. How you choose to experience messages coming your way is up to you. This whole article is making the assumption that if you want something more different, e.g. Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy (Fediverse Instagram/YouTube/Reddit), it basically must also be Mastodon/Pleroma (Fediverse Twitter). Why must it?
In the article the author mentioned that it's possible to message him over several protocols, but that only one of them will actually deliver the message?
It's on the author to advertise how they'd like communicated with.
A phone number != an email address != a WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram account != a Twitter/Facebook/Mastodon/etc. handle != a specific handle on a specific Discord/Slack/IRC service != "I go to the Lamb and Flag in Punterby on Wednesdays, maybe see me there"
It's irrelevant whether a low level protocol or its clients deliver everything or not. What matters is human A reaching human B. If human B wants to be reached, they will tell people in advance what their communication preferences are. And they will recognise that not all communication methods are fungible nor want to be or can be made to be. You can't expect ActivityPub to have the same behaviour as SMTP any more than you could IRC.
The app is not showing posts that don't contain a picture, but shows posts that do. So if you browse someone Mastodon account on Pixelfed, you will see just fraction of their posts.
I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway; but it shows that doing decentralised software is hard, because each actor can just do whatever they want.
Meanwhile this is the normal, expected, and well-received behavior on ATproto. Every platform defines its own lexicon and can optionally support others. It wouldn't make sense for a blogging platform like (for example) Leaflet to show Bluesky posts the same way it shows blog posts. And apps can be selective too: Skylight only shows video posts. It's exactly how it should be for a video app.
The "account" then is just the data on your PDS with as many views into it as someone wants to develop. If I'm browsing (viewing) an account (subset of data) through a platform or app devoted to one type of content (data), I only want to see that kind of content in the main timeline. I can always pull out something like ATExplore or PDSls if I want to see everything.
The complaint only makes sense for a protocol that expects you to make a new account for a new platform and has limited portability. It doesn't make sense when an "account" is just a view into data, no more morally compromised than an SQL query. I'm skeptical the movement to revive the dead half of ActivityPub that could enable similar functionality will go anywhere, but I am rooting for the folks behind it.
> I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway;
Me and all the (real human) people I follow on Mastodon disagree. Many well known people are on Mastodon. A lot of folks I used to follow on RSS are on Mastodon. For me, Mastodon is what killed RSS.[1]
[1] RSS was well and alive long after Google Reader shut down.
The author makes some solid points, and I don't love Uber the company, but I can't accept the notion that ridesharing is a shittier experience than taking taxis.
Only someone who willfully forgets how terrible taxis are could say that.
In Stockholm there is one taxi company that has always been better called “Taxi Stockholm”, quality cars with great experienced drivers and good service. It was a premium though. They have a good app as well.
Getting in anything else is variable, from good to being completely ripped off paying three times more and being driven all over the city to rack up miles. There are even services that make the signs on the cars look like Taxi Stockholm - so you get in the wrong car.
Ride sharing means that I can get in anything and at least get home in one of the shortest routes or not pay over what I should. Still prefer Taxi Stockholm.
In other cities ridesharing equalizes the experience.
Used to be. These days taxis offer the same (if not better) experience as ridesharing services - at least in cities where ridesharing services are available.
My experience pre-Uber was that cabs were never there when you need them, the cars were smelly and in bad shape, the rides were expensive, seatbelts were usually broken, and drivers were not particularly motivated to be civil, never mind kind.
I personally don't drink bottled water on principle, but in theory it's nice to know it's there if I'm suffering.
Are your local cabs just amazing? I'm open to it, but again... floored. This very well could be a regional difference.
Edit: I cannot believe that I forgot to mention that the entire taxi medallion system found in most cities was not only deeply corrupt and usually intimately connected with organized crime... but the ownership structure was such that they enabled some of the worst legal wage slavery rackets in the western world. You've had these deeply shady owners with dozens of medallions and fleets of easily replaced, mostly immigrant drivers who all seemed to be prepared to drive for decades before someday hopefully being able to buy their own car and then drive it until they die.
I share your well-deserved dislike of Uber, that's an easy sell.
Just speaking from my own experience here, it's really difficult to make a compelling case that from the customer's perspective it's just objectively nicer to take an Uber.
It's cheaper, cleaner, they will find you on quiet side streets, and yes, the evil water bottles are there if you want them.
I just wish that there was a more societally beneficial third option, since VR telepresence hasn't taken off outside of the furry raver community.
I think both of you are right but looking at different sections of the trend.
In general, taxi business is very tough and tend to became worse over time due to the systems in play.
Old taxi services quality varied widely, i.e. in some areas they went into shit already while in some they were still great.
Living in a big city with pretty lax taxi regulations I experienced whole range with some providers being top quality.
Uber injected billions into the market attracting a whole lot of new people to start doing taxi gigs, which made quality much better for some regions where regular taxi was already bad, but overall, the taxi business model was not changed much if at all.
When the free money dried out, and it became obvious that uber will not be able to transition into self-driving taxi service, the quality of their service starts going to shit everywhere.
In my city, local taxies developed their own apps which are not much worse than uber, some continue to provide old style service, and uber became the provider with the lowest quality.
In my opinion, Uber business model is based on the fact that “gig workers” cannot calculate the proper amortization cost of the vehicle, so when the time goes by, companies who do know how to calculate the proper costs provide better service.
Maybe we have different concepts of what a group chat is. To me, group chats have my friends, and we will never invite anybody who is not already a friend of everybody. They are supposed to be high-trust environments.
Somewhat different. Most of the group chats I’m in are related to house parties where the host knows everyone but I don’t. Or they are interest / hobby related.
> Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.
Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.
> Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.
Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill.
There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.
It helps a lot for a community to have a specific focus.
For instance if it is photography technique or sports talk or Arduino programming almost all problematic content is "off-topic" and easy to delete without splitting hairs or offending libertarian sentiments.
Similarly "no explicit images" is an easy line to defend, but anything past that like "no CSAM" is excruciatingly difficult.
For a general purpose platform where people can post what they want, particularly if there is a libertarian ethos where people cry about "censorship", moderation is a bitch.
My personal pet peeve is that on any platform that has DMs I get a lot of messages, particularly when starting a new account, for things that are transparently scams and if I was starting one today my feeling of responsibility leads me to the conclusion that I would not support DMs.
Resonates for me. I consume a bunch of content daily, but it's RSS mostly. Gemini, too. None of it is Facebook et al. I am in groups with friends and family on Signal and on Discord, and in email.
It feels more boring, for sure, but it is vastly more satisfyingly "human", if I can describe it that way.
Strong agree. I switched back to RSS after trying social media. Much more boring. And that has been a very good thing. It's also been much more substantive. It's like eating your veggies vs eating sugar candy.
Why should we believe that "being entertained" is a valuable thing? I suppose it serves an evolutionary purpose as "steering focus", e.g. noticing the unusual/novel/scary/etc. But, it's not the end goal. And overloaded attention mechanisms sounds like an obvious misfeature.
Ma Bell was never profitable without government cheese. And her offspring can’t do much but complain about how every one else is making huge margins over “their” infrastructure.
Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.
On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.
I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
>> On the other hand that's not enough for a business
It could be. Once Facebook had everyone on board they could have pivoted to a model where people pay directly. It's easy to forget how incredibly useful it was in the early years. It's not enough for a business that needs to endlessly grow but businesses don't NEED to do that - especially tech companies where costs can be incredibly low once the initial website is built.
20 years ago I'd say that "free-to-play" would have been necessary because of the N² value that social sites create, just getting the idea mainstream was difficult enough and you can very much see the phases we went through, how Facebook inspired Twitter and back, etc. Like, of my family and friends who are on Facebook I think very few of them would become subscribers.
Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are
- from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else
- incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value
In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough.
(e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)
We lost civilization to advertising IMO. It feels like the majority of all technology is built around monetizing clicks. Astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix.
Hear hear. Ban all advertising. We could do it slow.
Start by banning all gambling and drug commercials. That's like 20% of all commercials right there. This is already normal in other countries.
Then ban all billboards. People hate them already.
Then the big one, ban targeted advertising. With personalized ads gone, all of the incentives that make data collection profitable are gone.
Of course there will still be bad actors that want data mining to continue. But right now you can't even read 95% of websites because they have popups that make you agree to data mining just to get in. I'll be searching for like, a recipe and they want my name, device IP, browser fingerprint, and anything else they can pinch.
I'm searching for a nice spinach salad recipe. I go to google
First it fires up an LLM, which will run a GPU in an AI data center that they probably cleared a forest to build.
I just made nvdia stronger. I just helped pump their AI "adoption" numbers. And I helped train an AI that will help layoff me and my friends.
As always I run the search again with "-noai" at the end. Now I'm searching twice for no reason. The results were better, and faster 10 years ago.
It gives me results and I click the first link. A video that I can't pause starts auto playing. This recipe isn't that good so I go back and find another. I need to click the back button 4 times.
I try another link. And get another pop up. I opt into data mining this time because uBo is having trouble with the full page transparent overlays. Now they have my data to sell to 3rd party intermediaries that will sell them to companies like palantir and cambridge analytica. Every search builds a little more of my "shadow profile".
Maybe I should have just gone to the library and taken a picture. All I wanted was a salad recipe and I've now helped train the system that made brexit possible. I've helped nvdia. I've helped the very AI datacenters that I hate. I've helped the data miners.
The experience of using a computer in 2025 is exhausting. Particularly search engines. They used to work so good. They used to be so fast.
You probably recall when Google first came out, using that over Yahoo browse by category was a sea change in terms of finding things. That was the peak. People were still hesitant to put their credit card info so the majority of the internet was just labors of love. It was like a library. Now it is like a casino.
It was. And yet... Sometimes I wish I still had a curated list of links by category to browse. Does anybody know of anybody who maintains something like that these days?
We need a Caesar who will ban all advertising. Lacking a Caesar, we could start with publicly funded NFL stadiums e.g. MetLife to get a foot in the door and go from there. Something must be done.
Soooo, when my email client is text-only and doesn't show me the attachments from the multi-part, it's "actively destroying the Fediverse" ? Ploum doesn't make any sense here. A "platform" such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube etc. (Do not mistake with "client", there's multiple Peertube "clients" or "frontends" for instance) using ActivityPub shouldn't have to implement and provide the user with the whole spec, otherwise just make the "ActivityPub" platform, implement everything there why even bother making other platforms?
The email client might not show attachments, but will still let you know there is a message. Pixelfed is not letting the user know there is even a message.
Also you seem to be responding to the original post or just the first paragraph of this post. He understands the differences and the way he sees the differences is the whole post.
William James wrote that one of characteristics of a religious state of mind is its seriousness. I'll quote:
For common men “religion,” whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, “All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.”
I myself can compare this with the cultural state of Soviet Union. It was a very atheistic country on the surface; yet the art, the cultural scene, the newspapers, the cinema; the school education; the public forums (they existed in the form of letters to newspapers); everything was imbued with that idea that there are serious things, not everything is vanity. It wasn't dull or dark; it was very reviving, in fact, because it gave you the foundation, something firm to stand upon. There were fantastically funny comedies (I wish I could find modern comedies like that) but there was also seriousness. I still remember some journal pieces of that time that, I admit, formed me as a person. An essay about a relatively minor crime, for example: two women were bitten by guard dogs. Yet somehow it rose to your place in life; your approach to what life is; you and your responsibility for how you live. And these themes were everywhere. Until 1991.
Alan Watts says something similar about how religions often harden into institutions that demand loyalty and "purity".
When that happens, they slide into in-group/out-group thinking, defensiveness, and "spiritual one-upmanship" which makes everything more tense and brittle.
> Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore.
I get what is being said, but i disagree with the framing. The "brainwashing" happened in two stages, and the first stage is perfectly logical.
Most people don't want just 1 identity, and they want separate spaces for being different.
If you're already OK with having two accounts on BBS, what is 1 or 2 accounts more for thefacebook.com?
It took me a long time to notice that the word in the title is “massage”, and not “message”, in Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage (An inventory of effects): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
I think the desire to not centralize identity has more to do with it than anything. We present different facets to different communities. The pseudo-indelible nature of internet commentary means saying something to anyone potentially means saying it to everyone, in any context.
That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back.
At some point I realized those people were just like that.
I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.
We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
I think I somewhat agree with the author but I find the idea of a single account completely unappealing. My view on the benefits of federation is that you don't have a single entity gating your access. Having multiple accounts is a benefit.
No we didnt lose communication to entertainment. You still have communication protocols like email and xmpp. Fediverse is a communication protocol and some of that communication is entertainment. We need to seperate social media and fediverse because the philosophy is completely different. Fediverse has you make an account and you get posts from users you follow. The reason you need multiple accounts is because the sites are not complete enough to handle all of the different styles of posts. There is still a social and communication aspect to it.
Big tech social media is pushing you a stream of entertainment and pushing away from social interactions.
Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?
Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.
Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?
Because my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to, not a nagging number that sits there being more than zero.
And when I do pay attention to it, I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through the 180 emails that I've been cc'd on. It's literally not worth my time or dilution of my attention. When I have attempted to get on top of this by doing all the curation and rule-authoring that productivity mavens shout about, it works for a little while but entropy sets in.
I'm just not into scripting my own life and maximizing my productivity, and my job does not pivot on prompt email responses. So my email is a garbage dump with tire fires in it, and I know that, and I get on with the things I know are actually important.
I'm not recommending this! It's just the compromise that I have settled in to. But if you wonder "why would anyone," this is it.
It's very presence in the list is already a drain on my attention that I didn't ask for and do not want. The fact that it requires any action on my part to remove it from the queue is an issue in and of itself.
For mojuba and myself, email is a way to organize TODO items. Things to take care of exist either way, and email is an awesome way to keep track of, and process, events / tasks asynchronously.
shermantanktop and you, forbiddenvoid, seem to refuse organizing TODOs, or perhaps even the concept that external events be allowed to generate TODOs for you ("my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to"). I closely know this -- i.e., "garbage dump with tire fires in it" -- because that's precisely what my SO's mailbox looks like. Whereas I've maintained a perfect inbox 0 for several decades, both at work and privately.
This is an unbridgeable psychological divide between two attitudes toward, or even two definitions of, tasks and obligations. People who can naturally implement inbox 0 never lose track of a task (not just in email, but in any other medium either), and get indignated when they receive reminders. They're excellent schedulers, and orderly, but also frequently obsessive-compulsive, neurotic. People who can't instinctively do inbox 0 cannot be taught or forced to do it, they tend to need repeated reminders, and may still forget tasks. At the same time, they have different virtues; they tend to shine with ill-defined problems and unexpected events.
Neither group is at fault; the difference has biological roots, in the nervous system. Our brains physically differ.
I kind of agree, but I explain it differently. Everyone’s job is a mix of reactive and proactive work. For my particular job, reactive work is necessary but will expand to fill all my time and then some. Proactive work is ambiguous and uncertain, but usually ends up being the highest value work that I do.
If I spend all my time on other people’s demands, it will all be urgent, but not enough of it will be important.
That's a super interesting situation (and description).
I always order reviewing the work of others ahead of working on my own code. This works wonders for the team. But admittedly, if the review workload is not distributed well, then my approach produces an annoying imbalance for me, and over the longer term, it leads to burnout.
Put differently, if I enable / assist / mentor others, that produces value comparable to my own personal output, for the company (or that's at least how I understand things). However, the emotional value of each, to me, is comparable only up to a certain extent -- namely, as long as I get to write enough code myself. The proportion must be right.
I rely on management / the team to (self-)organize the review workload, and then I prefer to help others first, and work on my own stuff second. I draw much more satisfaction from working on my own code, but I feel the importance of supporting others, so I prioritize the latter. This particular prioritization too rewards me emotionally, but only up to a certain point. I can say "no", but, in my view, if I have to say "no" frequently, to requests for assistance, then the workload is ill-distributed, and that responsibility is not mine. (I explicitly don't want to be promoted to a level where I become responsible for assigning tasks to people.)
I’m in a senior position and just coming off a year where I intentionally focused on enabling others and making the collective group more effective. That meant more reactive (and less visible) work.
I got feedback that my contributions weren’t tangible and visible enough. I switched gears back to my previous mode (more proactive work) and all is well again.
Different work cultures treat this differently. At another company my enabling activities would have been valued more. But I do think being the glue in a group is usually undervalued.
Not really. I check a couple of times a day, look for stuff from people who are likely important, delete noisy stuff once a week, and the rest lingers.
The threaded nature of email both helps and hurts. If it’s from a chatty sender with a chatty reply all conversation, I can delete it all, except if my boss replies, I should probably look at that.
I should also say that I work at a large company where people are auto-included with varying levels of intention. If I never sent an email, I would still get hundreds per day. Coworkers do zero inbox, so it can be done. I just don’t try anymore. Slack is where the actually urgent stuff is anymore.
> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
I'm with you. I've had a mostly empty email for at least a decade (< 10 items, with each of them representing an action I'll need to take) and can't imagine doing it differently. I'm one of those empty desk/empty mind people, I guess.
In a just world you would do 16 hours of manual rock breaking and tilling in a gulag for a decade then you can come back and tell is how essential email is to your life, sorry "digital life" whatever the FUCK that is.
Reading through this thread, I can't help but think that Stanley Elkin got everything right when he wrote George Mills. The blurbs and reviews of George Mills often reduce it to being about the failures of the 99%, but I think it is more about why the 1% succeeds and the answer is fairly simple, because the 99% wants the 1% to succeed, it absolves them of all culpability. This is modern (contemporary) life, absolution. George Mills seems to only increase in relevance as far as I can see, but it only recedes in relevance in the eyes of the public because it offers no scapegoats.
This time it is different, right? The first George Mills was correct in believing that, but we don't live in his times.
The author’s ideological bent against Big Tech shows through most clearly in the passage on Uber:
> Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights
There are valid complaints about Uber, but most people consider it a materially better service than taxis most of the time. They vote that way with their wallets, long after VC subsidies ended, and often even when it costs _more_ than a taxi.
Social Media fills the same role that Alcohol used to. As far as debilitating addictions go, it does seem to be a small improvement though. Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example.
I know it seems reductive, but in the early 90s there was a serious discussion about NAT. NAT bifurcates the internet into producers and consumers. naturally everyone looking to monetize the internet thought this was just fine, even desirable. and almost all the people who actually built the internet were aghast. ubiquitous reachability was the goal, not making a new form a television.
the details wrt social media etc were unknown, but the path we were taking was quite clear.
Communication was mostly lost before the rise of social media—assuming we ever had anything more than isolated pockets of actual communication, which I am not convinced we have. Literature has been exploring this for a good many decades, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good example and even shows how our relation to it has changed in the 80 odd years since its release; these days when it comes up the interpretation/discussion about it is more often than not, about social causes, which is depressingly ironic, it is using the novel in the same way the characters of the novel use Singer.
The book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman seems really relevant here. The thesis is that different modes of information are best suited to different tasks. Postman argues that television is best suited for entertainment. So the programs that do well on TV will naturally tend to be entertainment.
That book was written in 1985, but the core observations are also applicable to modern cellphones (which have become, for the majority of users, entertainment devices).
Postman then talks about how our communication systems have degraded as a result of entertainment being the strength of our current modes.
Ploum is one of the people getting me into blogging 12 or so years ago. I'm so glad to see it popup again here, it's like a big piece of nostalgia. And the piece is current. Thanks Ploum!
I don't get the hangup on having multiple accounts. The point of AP is that you can read any kind post, not create any kind of post.
There is a truth to consumption over communication, but that is in the destruction of third spaces and the increasing difficulty in making friends. The fediverse is a force against that in my view, even if it has some of the creature comforts of regular social media.
"All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected."
This isn't true. You can still meet in person or make a phone call.
As for news media... They tend to be at the beck and call of whoever owns them. Most of them use the same press agencies but promote political binaries to the exclusion of other viewpoints.
Sure but wasn't this always the case? People told stories. joked, bantered, preached, and flirted both to communicate on different levels and to entertain themselves and each other.
And so my Signal is solid 40% memes. Memes that someone carefully selected and sent me but still pure entertainment. No evil monopoly necessary to make it so.
IMHO communication is entertainment sometimes. Most of the “communication” we do day to day, like small talks to colleagues, or tweeting some posts, in my opinion, is just a way to relax and have fun, like patting each other electronically.
Throughout history, real social conversations and movements have happened around thought leaders that dedicate their lives to painstakingly understanding and expressing a certain point of view on a set of issues. Be it in written form or through oratory, it then acts as an anchor to frame and facilitate conversations between people one-on-one.
Real progress requires that hard work of crafting and spreading a vision, something to point at that helps people express what they struggle to express themselves. It also then needs that protected intimacy of long conversations between individuals to digest it.
The architecture of social media centered around short-form public communication is not appropriate for this.
This of course applies to both constructive and destructive movements, but it’s the only way to get big real things done. I suppose that’s why we have this emergent class of powerful independent (podcast) intellectuals after a long time of the concept not being a thing. Again, for better or worse, plenty of both.
If serious conversation isn't possible on social media, then what do you call this?
Is the conversation we're having now not both serious and on social media?
I think if the great minds of old had access to our modern internet, they would have no trouble communicating their ideas. It's not like all social media is short form. You can type a whole book into the comment box here if you want.
Social media is probably not the best place to make such communications anyway. It is good for propaganda but not good for serious discussion. Serious, scientific discussion asks for a lot more than just communication itself.
> But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social!
Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up.
I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.
Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front.
For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)
But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).
> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly."
This has been my biggest beef with Facebook. I have an FB account, but never use it, anymore. By walking away from it, there are a number of folks with whom I can no longer communicate.
In some cases, that’s fine, but in a couple, I sincerely miss them.
I like the idea behind the fediverse, but find it too “fiddly” to use. That’s often an issue with things designed by engineers, for engineers.
There’s long been discussion of “One ID to Rule Them All,” but that brings in the inevitable (and completely valid) point of who arbitrates/controls the infrastructure for that ID (“and in the Darkness, Binds Them”).
The thing is, folks really want convenience. If it’s not provided as a benevolent resource, an opening is made available to less benevolent people. It’s going to happen, and all the hand-wringing in the world can’t stop human nature.
I feel that public discourse is particularly vulnerable to the medium. Who controls the medium, controls the discourse, and, as we’ve already seen, that can have serious consequences in the real world.
Not a new conundrum. Social Media has simply sprinkled Miracle Gro onto the problem.
I’m not sure there’s any real solution. I am thinking that today’s newer generation (“Alpha”?) is developing a “thick skin,” and maybe, is becoming resistant to people that manipulate communication. I’m fairly despondent about my generation. We seem to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the shysters.
Bluesky seems to be pre-Musk Twitter 2.0. Its content is basically the same (art + "look at the bad thing the Republicans are doing - the Democrats will solve this"). Its moderation policies are basically the same (post anything too different from what's there = ban. Centralised moderation). Its user base, although smaller, draws from roughly the same pool. And Jack Dorsey made it. And it even has a blue logo. It's clear he just wanted to create Twitter a second time and succeeded at that.
I just don't understand why do you need to create a new incompatible protocol when ActivityPub exists - unless enshittification is in the roadmap. Even less I understand why prefer it over e.g. Mastodon from the user's perspective
This article makes me think of how defiant Discord has been against all of this, and how slowly I'm starting to succumb to many of the same forces, although much slowly than other platforms. It's a minor miracle they never got bought up/sold themselves.
Also reminds me of the Dark Forrest Yancy Strickler stuff.
We must stop calling them social media and call them what they have become: media. The percentage of actually social stuff is negligible. Now you can classify having a conversation with a random stranger that you never going to meet in your life over twitter as "being social". I'd say you are just passing time or entertaining yourself. Or worse, compensating lack of real world social interactions.
I found this a bit odd as I don't recall ever thinking of social media as about "sending messages", and only loosely would I say they're for "communication". They're mostly for one-way communication, which is essentially what entertainment is too, so it's not surprising that social media would feel like entertainment. When you make a post on Facebook you're not really "sending a message" to anyone in particular, you're just broadcasting it out to the network.
But this got me thinking about what I think a "message" really is. Maybe there's a Dunbar's number kind of thing here because I feel like there's some sort of limit on how many people I can send textual content to before it stops being a "message" and becomes more like an "announcement". Like I get emails, and some of those are messages because they come from individuals and are sent to me and perhaps a small set of other individuals. But some emails are more like announcements (or even "content"), and such quasi-messages have existed since before email went mainsteam (like holiday newsletters that people sent out with xmas cards).
It's true that many social media platforms have a messaging system that exists in parallel ("direct messages"), but that always seemed kind of separate from the core essence of the platform.
The closest you get to real "messages" in social networks is comments, but in my experience the degree to which those constitute "messages" or "communication" varies a lot from platform to platform and also from user to user. These days a large proportion of comments are just slightly more specific "reactions" like "That's so great!" or "Wow" or "Thanks for posting this". I don't often see genuine discussion happening in comments (although HN, if you consider it a social media site, is an exception to this).
There has been an evolution in this regard, but even back in the day I think it wasn't what I'd call "messaging". The earliest platform I can remember using that (in retrospect) I could call a social network was LiveJournal. But LJ was a blogging platform. You didn't post "messages" to other people, you posted, well, posts, and maybe people would comment on them or maybe they wouldn't. I would never have said that I dreamed of LJ becoming "email 2.0". And I'd say modern microblogging-type platforms (like Twitter) seem even more removed from email or "messaging".
I also don't see decentralization as really connected to this. To me the main advantage of decentralization is to eliminate single points of failure and guard against various sorts of rugpulls (like what eventually happened to LJ). But whether a platform fosters communication, messages, interaction, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much independent of whether it's decentralized.
This isn't to say that I disagree that something's been lost in internet communication over the years. But to me that missing thing seems mostly to be a combination of attention and authenticity.
We've lost attention in the sense that now that people do everything with their phones, they consume and create content more diffusely, as opposed to having a division between "I'm sitting at my computer reading or writing" and "I'm doing something else". The small screens and balky input mechanisms of phones make this problem even worse for writing than it is for reading.
And we've lost authenticity in the sense that so many platforms have become contaminated with stuff that is in no sense communication from any human, not even one-way communication. Instead it's junk generated by corporations to sell products (perhaps with some intermediate steps of harvesting data, etc.). This has become much, much worse in the last few years with the rise of AI slop. It's harder and harder to find stuff on the web that actually represents the work of a human being expressing themselves in a personal way.
So yeah, we've lost something, but I wouldn't say we lost communication to entertainment. It's more like we lost the boundaries of the units of our communication so that we find ourselves in a constant blur of content, rather than a sequence of discrete units each of which we process and ponder independently.
This is one of those articles that is too obsessed with amusing itself with its own pretentiousness to communicate anything interesting - which is ironic given the author seems thinks they prefer communications to entertainment.
Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism.
Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.
For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.
I haven't watched the news in 5 years. I started watching it again since Bondi (I live nearby), and while I'm surprised at the variation in reporting styles (political bias?) between Australian channels, my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
I've found it very helpful to watch the live briefings, Q&As, etc with politicians, but the news cycle here is so short (hourly) that a few minutes later you get to hear a "recap" by the news reporter that glosses over most of the important and interesting points (at best) or actively removes key nuance and outright changes the message delivered by the original person (at worst).
I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
Presumably this was what "journalism" was originally supposed to be.
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveye
Much of it is merely factual statements conveyed by over-the-top body language and vocal intonation which paint a clear "this is bad" or "this is good" language. Often the language is biased as well, but the modern newscasters are "telling you how to feel" via the tone of voice in the same way that a friend is "telling you how to feel" when he recounts his horrible day that the office. Via body language and tone of voice he prompts you to respond sympathetically to him, and the newscaster does much the same.
I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters, the idea that research/journalism is hot-swappable with fact-checking.
Sometimes in conversation Israel or tariffs or whatever comes and I'm always like... idk? What do I, have a PHD? I know enough to know they're complex issues and the worst thing i could do is have a strong opinion
And then they scoff, and say, "so you just 'trust the experts,' then?"
I don't have the time to become expert in global affairs, history, climate science... all the fields implicated by the big hot-button issues. The next best thing is defer to someone knowledgeable and objective (given you can find such a person), IMO.
> I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters
So much this! Social media has also allowed people to reinforce their own opinions and spread them by connecting with others who think the same way. Back when we mainly interacted in real social communities, fringe ideas couldn't get traction because there wasn't enough reinforcement.
Neither of those are topics that are particularly complex, though.
And I realize that I'm taking the bait, but it's worth noting that the flip-side of the oversimplification of complex topics in modern news media is the affordance of notions of complexity to issues that are fairly cut-and-dry, when applying known and well-accepted standards to them. Solving housing issues in the US? Complex, though news media would have you believe that the answer is simply, "Build more." Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Simple, though biased experts spend enormous amounts of energy spinning extant circumstances that are readily accounted for in most definitions of genocide. Tariffs? Very well understood. Ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Apparently a bit more difficult than flooding the country with weapons and finger-wagging at Vladimir Putin until he stops being bad.
Note also that this isn't predicated on the existence or non-existence of social media as an influential force. It's simply a matter of whether or not the corporate and political interests that steer public discourse find it useful to complicate or simplify a news story.
I have found that, often, there is only so much information to convey. They keep talking because that is their job, but you've already been told all there is to know. The rest is speculation, rumor, and prattle.
That's especially true for evolving emergencies like Bondi. In my opinion, you might as well wait until tomorrow, or next week, and get all of the information at once. Unless, of course, you're involved, but that's extremely rare.
I watch news (and everything else) on YouTube at 2x speed to keep the information density high enough to be worthwhile. Once you get used to it, regular media becomes less tolerable because everyone is talking too slow.
I often watch YouTube at 1.5x speed and then during work meetings my brain starts looking for the speed button.
Those are the wrong sort of work meetings.
Where possible you want everyone to be well informed on the way in, at least about the current situation and the obvious proposals. This gives people time to digest the information and maybe even suggest their own proposals.
Then there's two types of meetings.
* Leadership communication meetings (quick review to make sure everyone understands how important the data they already knew about is / cement context).
* Brainstorming meetings (figure out a plan / pathfinding)
I feel like the goal of most meetings is to ensure everyone feels heard and included, and if by the way we push the work forward, that's a bonus.
what the techno-industrial mindprison does to an mf
My best personal joke is to generate a summary of the looooong video, have AI make a short video about the video then play at 2x
It's much more fun to have AI generate an image depicting the summary and try to guess what it was all about.
The 2x speed will only keep your brain preoccupied enough not to notice the relevant information is missing or made very shallow... getting the same slop in half the time won't solve the problem.
You just cut out the low information ramblers.
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
This is the key. I think they (entertainers cosplaying as journalists) do it on purpose. For example, from time to time I do attempt to watch some "news" on TV with my partner.
A typical interaction may be: - TV - "..the president vetoed a bill to lower taxes...here is what this politician thinks: 'I think he only cares to gain support of the extremists he secretly supports', and here is what another politician thinks 'it was a bad bill'" - me to my partner - "did I miss it? have they said what the bill was about? What were the exact things that were questionable?" - her - "nope" - TV - "... The president says he will be submitting a similar bill minus the parts he disagreed with, and now a house burned down in..." - me - "WTF was that?"
I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
> I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
Exactly my impression. I tell people there is no real news in the United States, only gossip style reporting of information one can do nothing about and has nothing to do with them. If the reporting it political, it's in 4th grade language and a second grade mentality. News in the United States is talking to children.
It’s not even a game. There just isn’t that much news to report on 24/7. And even when an event does happen, the early reports are often wrong. People crave an update when there is no update to give.
> "isn't that much news"?!
We are not given any factual and material information on business activities in the nation, which is what the nation is actually doing. Who (as in companies) are gaining, are losing, and how is this economic conflict manifesting for their consumers and employees? None of that reporting is performed, the population is too shallow minded to even understand the discussion. Where are the local economics news that graduates to county, state and region with actionable numbers and not pointless no-ground reporting like "the stock market has trading volume of x trillions" <- useless information.
We get sports and entertainment news, which is not news, not really, not at all.
> I haven't watched the news in 5 years. ...my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
They're more concerned in being the first than being accurate.
Unless the event is something definitive like "celebrity died", it's much better to just check what happened a few days later when there are some actual facts and not just rushed speculation masquerading as facts.
I'd pay a modest subscription for a service that would give me the news, but just delayed by 24-72 hours, after all the "BREAKING NEWS" crap is just "news".
Part of the challenge is unless you know what the "news reporter's" role is (are they just reporting what they see/have heard vs. analysis/opinion and what their relevant expertise is; I'd suggest good news providers have clear divides and provide this information (though with biases), those that don't likely have some agenda), you get a mix of voices/views without a clear understanding of the facts. A different challenge is constraints of the various content formats/audiences (which are really only obvious when the same journalist does the same story in different formats).
I'll also add that paradoxically, bias is not really the problem here, but rather the problem is bias-disguised as objectivity. There's truly nothing wrong with a commentator who states "I have a particular view on this issue. Here are some of the things which inform my view. Here are the strengths of my view, here are the weaknesses, and here are what some of my opponents argue."
What we didn't know back in the 1990s was how little this sort of presentation (that you describe) was engaging. Everyone could sort of tell, which is why producers shied away from it, but with the rise of algorithms and internet slop it can be measured very precisely. And the measurements show that it's damn near close to zero, on whatever scale it is that they use.
Intelligent people are boring. They're worried about problem-solving. Problems like on the tests back in school that used to make my head hurt, problems I'd get the red X on and have to repeat 3rd grade over because of. Unintelligent people are exciting. They're in conflict. They're fighting, or going to find a fight somewhere, and if you watch long enough they might even get into that fight right then and there (Bill O'Reilly used to do that on air, after all).
IMO "just reporting what they see" is a solution at all. I tried looking at messages through that angle, and too often there is very important context that you need, or the message's content does not make sense, or becomes something different.
For example, we have plenty of "journalism" that reports exactly what some entity says. That just makes them a PR channel. If they added context that politician's or company's message's content's meaning would turn on its head and would be exposed as a lie.
Similarly, a lot of news would greatly benefit from larger context that just is not there, and that the vast majority of "consumers" of the news are simply not aware of, through no fault of their own.
"Just report what you see" IMHO is part of the problem, not the solution. It's trying to "solve" the reporting problem by removing most of the role of journalists because they are seen as unreliable, for good reasons, but I don't think that works at all. It is similar to trying to solve all problems by adding ever more rules for everything, to remove the uncertainty and unreliability of individual decisions.
This is just like at work, where the capital owners and bosses would love to replace all those pesky annoying opinionated humans with something more controllable and predictable. If the intelligence can be moved from the people into the process, the latter become replaceable and much cheaper, and the company gets much more control. But it is not just the owner class that does not like having to rely on and to deal with other humans.
I think the direction of development of the role of journalists has actually gone way too far in exactly the direction of them using less and less of their own brains, and having less influence and ability, for most messages, the very few deeper pieces notwithstanding.
Although, none of that will do anything as long as the news source owner structure is the way it is, with a few billionaires controlling most of the big news sources.
Only doing "just reporting what they see" is a problem as well (and even AP (https://apnews.com/) does analysis, and their more on the "just reporting what they see" side than most news providers), but opinions being presented as facts is far more common (at least from the mainstream AU media, I don't know what the situation is elsewhere), hence trying to clearly demarcate the two is better than being unclear about what you are presenting. You need facts and analysis, and them labelled as such.
Personally, I find a good example of this is the different election broadcasts: the commercial TV broadcasters tend to have their staff take both the role of election analyst (i.e. result prediction) and commentator, whereas the ABC (one of the public broadcasters) has tended to have clear separation of roles (enough such that the election analyst who just retired has a cult following), with an election analyst who is giving detailed predictions and calls the election, political journalists providing context/analysis, polling experts covering what the polls missed/got right, and politicians from the major parties giving their opinions as well.
I used that book as a background example in a presentation I did you faculty on how to integrate new open resources into their classes. One guy in the back laughed really hard at that screen and everyone looked at him like he was a lunatic.
And that's the story of how I made a work best friend.
Seriously though, if you haven't read amusing ourselves to death you need to.
This is why I love listening to Joe Rogan, it’s hard for someone to keep to their coached media narrative for three and a half hours. I’m generally suspicious of people who tell me I shouldn’t listen directly to the words of people they dislike.
Though you are now buying into the Rogan worldview with his show, which is its own set of issues, namely he’s routinely proven that he’s unwilling to press people on real concrete issues or criticisms if it means he might be in even a small amount of hot water with whatever in group he’s catering to
> This is why I love listening to Joe Rogan […]
Climate Town had a video a little while ago, "Joe Rogan Doesn't Understand Graphs", where Rogan talks about a Washington Post article and says things about it that are the exact opposite of what is written in the article:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1bMJekCiBw
* https://www.climatetownproductions.com/youtube/rogan
> I’m generally suspicious of people who tell me I shouldn’t listen directly to the words of people they dislike.
You mean like Mel Gibson talking about climate change, without any pushback or being unchallenged by Rogan?
Joe Rogan regularly has people on his show that he just lets lie to his face. The promotion of fake archaeology being the clearest/strangest example of this in recent times (many more examples from political guests).
> I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
I have found that some Youtube channels and videos (non-comprehensive examples below (I have hundreds of subscribed channels), mostly not politics, but these things inform politics since politics is making decisions about other things) can fill this gap nicely. This is not a perfect choice, since journalism integrity and standards do not apply, but I find that this can be mitigated by watching a wide variety (for example, in the field of economics, I regularly watch creators who espouse everything from very free-market capitalism all the way to full on communism). There are likely other forms of new media that operate at this level of depth, but I haven't found htem.
https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWUaS5a50DI
https://www.youtube.com/@HowMoneyWorks
https://www.youtube.com/@DiamondNestEgg
https://www.youtube.com/@TLDRnews (and associated channels)
https://www.youtube.com/@BennJordan (recent good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo)
I started watching the full press releases and politicians interviews which are normally available on YouTube. It just changed how I view geopolitics. The media is extremely biased and absolutely does not report what people are actually saying. You really should never accept at face value what the news are reporting.
> I started watching the full press releases and politicians interviews which are normally available on YouTube.
Is this true for Australian politics? This is exactly what I'm looking for. Currently all my searching for recent events just results in summarised/paraphrased news reports with some footage, or shorts and clickbait.
Parliamentary question time is pretty good for that here in Australia, I'd recommend giving it a listen every now and again.
Yes and the Senate has a radio IIRC and you can listen to every discussion they have!
Thank you for these sources! Happy to see Benn Jordan, How Money Works and Technology Connections as grey links :-)
>I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.
I love both books, but when you read Understanding Media you will see how blatantly Postman just restated McLuhan's basic thesis and pretended to tweak it to make it his own ("the medium is the metaphor" has the same meaning as "the medium is the message"). However, I found where Postman's book really excelled was in its presentation of the historical changes in literacy in the US. I knew we were a literate country once, but I didn't realize just how much we were.
Honestly, it boils down to capitalism / market pressure. Quality journalism is expensive, compared to the return in the form of the price people are willing to pay for that quality journalism. Clickbait is so profitable, it's like a powerful magnet pulling all news institutions, be they TV channels, newspapers, or whatever, towards that model.
LLMs can produce a literal terabyte of slop for cheaper than a month's wage for a journalist. I'm not hopeful.
Even when I was younger, I was baffled by how people could get their news just from TV, because the amount of information in a TV news report was so tiny compared to what you'd get in a newspaper. When I hear that people view TikTok as their main news source, it's like telling me people wear watermelons as socks. It's so nuts its hard for me to even bring the concept into my brain.
The TV will have maybe 5 stories, each told in one way only.
The Internet (including TikTok) will have nearly unlimited stories, told in unlimited ways.
I remember very well when just a few powerful people were allowed to decide what the public would be allowed to know and not know. They could suppress huge stories and leave the public in the dark. For example Chernobyl. They still try that today in print media and television, but have become a pathetic laughing stock now that information is free.
Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
An infinite stream of all possible information, true and false is exactly as useful as no information at all - and social media are getting pretty close to this ideal
It demands more of the person seeking information. Just like any intelligence gathering.
It's usually not very hard to verify information, and then you know which sources to trust better.
That's a classic trick of opinion manipulation. You start an account that posts factual content that caters to target audience. Then once the rapport is built, you throw your narratives in. The barrier to do this, on scale, all the time has never been lower
All media is opinion manipulation. You could even stretch that to say that all communication is opinion manipulation.
Highly respected and highly ranked mass media sometimes publish outright lies and made up stories, completely knowingly. Because they are in the business of manipulation. So you have to trust your gut, and verify if something smells strange. Many times it isn't even possible to verify, as for much of war reporting.
There will never be a time when there will be an absolute guarantee of anything. Not as long as there are people.
I think there's a difference between trying to stay informed and seeking information. I swipe to my newsfeed and see seven stories ranging from local to national, from local news station to fox to New York times. Fact checking each of these stories will take time that I do not care to spend, and I imagine most folks will not.
That begs the question: If you don't care about these stories enough to do anything to verify, then why do you care to hear/see/read these stories?
The only rational answer is that they are just entertainment to you. And to most other people.
“If you don’t care about false alarms, why do you listen to the fire alarm sounding and then evacuate the building? The only rational answer is that the fire alarm is just entertainment to you”
The rational answer is that they look at the news to see if there are any stories important and relevant enough that they would care to verify them.
Yes, agreed. News has become entertainment, because the standard for news has fallen so much. Which makes actual news harder for most people to attain.
"pretty close" is pretty generous! I'd say it's already there.
> The Internet (including TikTok) will have nearly unlimited stories, told in unlimited ways.
Mainstream TV channels have their biases but "unlimited" doesn't actually mean anything if the content you're getting served is whatever the algorithm thinks will engage you, which is usually something that already aligns with your world view, or something that doesn't but is designed to outrage. Most average folks who browse the internet aren't looking past the sensational headlines they see in their Apple or Google curated news feeds.
>Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
Imagine talking about how the "internet has unlimited stories" and then following up with "people who use TikTok are better informed".
If you're getting the information by listening to one of those jackasses in their sing-song presenter voices... you're not getting information at all. You're functionally illiterate and hyponotized by someone who learned to exploit Youtube-style algorithms.
> Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
Possible, but also quite unlikely. From the people who post "news" on TikTok, I wonder how many spent at least 30-60 minutes on verifying what they're about to post? There is an endless sea of "influencers" who want to be first with posting something, that "validate what you're about to report" doesn't even enter the arena before they've posted their snippet. And if it's retracted, count on the video just silently disappearing.
Contrast that with TV and print that at least have some sort of validation, although imperfect, with editors and what not, that review things before they're published. Now of course, US media is a really shit example of proper journalism, as they've all fallen into basically doing "content creation", but if you look at other newspapers and news channels around the world, you'll see that proper journalism is still done, and the people pushing videos on TikTok usually do "content creation" very differently from TV and paper, with very different understanding of what they're actually contributing to.
There is a flip side to this. Yes it was stabilizing to have “boring” news where every provider largely had the same stories. But there was a narrower Overton window of issues to be discussed. A single thread of attention at any one time.
There are advantages to the disjointed, small, grassroots, often histrionic, news of today. We get a lot more perspectives in our news. We get so many it’s overwhelming (and we sadly need to jump into our corners to feel safe).
Anyone can start a Substack now and the market can decide if they’re a journalist. In my town there are several more trusted and prominent than the local broadcast news. Some specialize in a topic like housing. Some focus on govt going’s on. And of course there are local nutjobs (or I think they are, others disagree?
It’s messy and not nearly summarized, but in some ways it’s better and more detailed than bland evening news.
Current news media is even more narrowly focused on the three hot news stories of the day with 24-hour repetitive commentary all funneled into the narrative of the day.
Yes though cable news is in a gradual decline
https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-the-cable-news-rati...
The real action in news media is in flagship newspapers (WSJ, NY Times), podcasts, substacks..
Every generation experiences the current downgrade as catastrophic, only to later discover it was already a compromise layered on top of an earlier one
I think, at a minimum, a return to print or radio news is called for. They necessitate attentive consumption of information in a way that video just doesn't. I feel like they leave mental space open for critical thought. TikTok is the total opposite.
I don't know how bad TikTok is because shorts just don't grab hold of me hard enough to even look at the app, at most I see someone else sharing a short of something silly on a meme channel.
But… and I appreciate you did say "at a minimum"…
Radio is absolutely something you can have on in the background, vibrating your eardrums without engaging your attention.
Intentionality may be impossible in TikTok for all I know, but it isn't enough to just do radio, and I think also not print.
So if we try to walk up all the ladders of abstractions and get to the core where we cannot go yet another layer above, what we end up? Word of mouth basically?
Amusing ourselves to death was such an eye opener for me when I was 19. After that I never took the news seriously.
I'm curious, is there some meaningful way for geriatric millennials to use Tik Tok?
Without being sucked in into doomscrolling and content consumption? Produce content? I'd guess it should be possible to play with the thing somehow...
My general view on TikTok is: why would I even remotely want to use something that's specifically designed to exploit me and manipulate me? The tiny shred of value I might experience (in the form of an occasional interesting video) is a side-effect of the service, and if they could get their value out of me and give me literally nothing at all, they would. This same perspective applies to all the centralized "social media" services out there today. None of them exist to make society better or improve the lives of anyone in any meaningful way (outside of enriching the executives and investors running them).
To be frank, the TikTok algorithm is the best of all the algorithmic doomscroll machines you can use.
Instagram is trash, Youtube Shorts is complete AI puke trash.
TikTok actually seems to "know" what I like seeing and clearly learns faster than the others.
A quick test just now:
Zero ads. All were from "real" people, not content farm accounts.Instagram reels:
Not even touching Youtube Shorts, they're even worse.Yeah, in fact I'm trying to wend myself away from the internet generally. (Sure don't need more of that shit.)
To be honest, it's pretty easy to surface useful content on TT. Its algorithm is far more responsive to, say, immediate skips and likes/follows than Ig or FB.
I have found it a lot easier to find a diversity of opinions from a more diverse group of folks there. Specifically, I have been really interested in what leftist/liberal bipoc folks think about current events, and it's very easy to get that content. And it's easy enough to flip quickly past hoteps and maga black men, who I don't usually care about hearing from. The disussions between say, black anarchists, pro-Harris DNC folks, and afropessimists have been very enlightening, personally.
Those aren't conversations I have been able to find on, say, Ig.
The main thing is that it pays a lot of attention to what you actually stop and watch, so if you let your attention wander you might end up watching folks rebuild industrial electric motors or paint warhammer minis.
Honestly, I think it's a lot less mind numbing than the last bits of broadcast TV or feature films folks have inflicted on me, regardless of folks enjoying their ability to hate on it.
I've tried multiple times with a TikTok account to get me useful videos and its always kids playing some weird games. FB/YT are much better and instantly switching content when I skip past a video.
TikTok is unusable for me.
I get a lot of stuff I care about (some scientific papers overviews, blender/davinci editing tips and tricks, bits of high-quality podcasts) on tiktok, even if I just go for 5 minutes to entertain myself with some audio-visual crap. Mention of its algorithm being responsive matches my observations here.
Why? Just leave it be, and your life will be just as rich if not richer.
I think one good reason is connecting with the youth. My kids are too young for Tik Tok but old enough to come home with 6-7 (btw, best antidote to that is the 7-8-9 joke ;) ) and "chicken banana", and I'm told this comes from Tik Tok. I grew up in a house where every BSOD was caused by the fact that we installed video games, and I'd rather not be that kind of parent to my own kids. I'm also like GP though, I'd rather not go full scrollhead, so it's a bit of a dilemma.
As a former child, I'm not sure I would have wanted the adults mimicking my behavior. Back then I loved the occasions where the adults and us kids got together, such as festivities, and I got to hear their stories. They were all interesting and serious people though, with interesting lives and jobs (I was born in the 1970s and many of the adults had experienced WWII, or, the parents, the hard years following it - I am [East] German). No strange opinions about science or politics.
I think that's similar to when politicians try to "be like the people". I think "normal people", and children, prefer that their "betters" are actually examples of something better.
Agree. Your role as a parent is probably to serve as an example to them—even of old-fashioned, crufty ways. (Surprised/not-surprised to find my kids are curious about film cameras, vinyl, audio cassettes, MUDs, BBS'es…)
It's not a question of mimicking, it is interesting what is current within the teenage/student community. Adult population runs out of steam at some point.
You can search TikTok memes on YouTube. People upload them.
You using TikTok earnestly would result in a feed vastly different from your kids anyway.
Would you even see the same videos they do, given how customized feeds are?
I hear a lot of people be incredibly critical of TikTok, while being active consumers of Facebook/Instagram/X/etc. I've found the content on TikTok to be much better curated to what I actually like, with just enough (i.e., very little!) other content sprinkled in occasionally.
I asked someone a similar question to you a year ago and they told me something like "just spend 15 minutes with it. Aggressively swipe past things you aren't enjoying, like the the things you like. Search for something you are interested in too and like anything you like there". My feed is currently entirely basketball coaching tips for kids, cooking & recipes, stand up comedy, basic DIY, fitness/running tips, local restaurant recommendations, and sports highlights.
We don't have TikTok here (India), but I find YouTube shorts pretty useful. My feed is a mix of Action Labs shorts, Omar Agamy news, ZTT PC stuff, psychology, videos about animals (pet, domestic, wild), etc. I don't know what your standard for meaningful is, but the shorts are at least as useful as long form videos to me, if not more.
An important bit of context is that I prefer to get detailed information through text, research, sometimes podcasts, but rarely ever videos. The shorts serve as one low effort way (among others) for me to surface new potentially interesting things, to follow up on to the degree I find useful or interesting.
Closed-source, very-limited-API platforms like Tik Tok do not actually let you "play with the thing". What I imagine you would be interested in is a client which, say, gets the text version of a large number of short videos, filters those texts based on criteria you have defined and meta-data from TikTok (time, number of views, some proxies for a 'quality' measure) and serves you up with the results in a textual form, or perhaps a page with titles/summaries and links to the text and the video.
I'm not sure that's worth it but I'm willing to be this is not possible to achieve.
There is no meaningful way to use it.
Why do people rag on TikTok? What the hell did you grow up on and did your parents and older folks from the previous generation not look down on that with a sigh or disgust??
Rock music? Rap? Video games??
In East Asia I see TikTok as pretty healthy, encouraging kids and even older people to be more active in public spaces, doing harmless dances or imitating other trends. It's actually pretty refreshing. Why you hatin?
Or is the West just salty that Facebook/YouTube/Instagram etc fell off as sterile in comparison?
I can actually remember when the consensus on HN was that TikTok was a novel, fresh experience that reminded them of the "old web" and its spark of creativity.
Now the consensus seems to be that it's a Chinese mind-control tool and it represents everything the misanthropes here hate about modern culture, the web and the generations that participate in it.
It seems to be exactly the same generational impulse as our parents railing against the "boob tube" and "devil music" or (to quote RMS) "(c)rap music." Although they weren't entirely wrong they weren't nearly as correct as they insisted they were. I suspect the same is true about the current moral panic around social media, and TikTok in general. Yes there are legitimate concerns, but it isn't the ontological evil people make it out to be either. It isn't actually controlling people's minds. It isn't actually more addictive than heroin.
And to answer NiloCK without another comment, what's worse will be "TikTok but everything is AI generated by the platform itself." Say what you will about TikTok, at least a lot of it is still human expression.
That's my experience too, TikTok has the most "real" accounts surfaced compared to the competition.
> Now the consensus seems to be that it's a Chinese mind-control tool and it represents everything the misanthropes here hate about modern culture, the web and the generations that participate in it.
If you drop the word "Chinese" and "misanthrope" I'm in board with your description.
> If you drop the word "Chinese" (a mind-control tool)
So no worse than FB etc. then, even Reddit and HN where certain views are promoted and others buried.
I recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
For me the difference is exactly what the article is about. TikTok was the first to abandon even a pretense of being about communication and became all about content. Facebook and IG have went the same way and are barely better these days, but TikTok exemplifies the trend
> For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
So your argument is centrally controlled and edited distribution of news information is superior?
I was born in 82, and news has been largely rubbish in almost all forms. Heavily biased by the editors/owners, things missing, weird focuses. The 1940s was filled with propaganda and newspapers were owned by a few moguls or by fascist governments.
At least with the uncensored internet it's possible to educate yourself. There is plenty of amazing journalism if you look around. Including on Tik Tok!
Yep. I remember my dad quoting some major news anchor as saying, “My job isn’t to report the news; it’s to shape perception.” Or something like that. I started watching the news with that as my lens, and it seems to be an axiom of the entire industry. I never have managed to find a reliable way to filter the signal from the noise, other than watching / reading the direct sources (CSPAN or whatnot). No one has time for that.
News has never been about reporting absolute truth, there is just too much influence/power/money to be gained for manipulating public perception.
The fact that people believe in journalistic integrity shows how successful they are at brainwashing the public.
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This site is showing me two speeches and some AI 'analysis'. The analysis is very shallow.
I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight:
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
We are destroying ourselves; the very core of what it is to be human. I say this acknowledging the irony of writing this on my phone, on a Sunday morning, when I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.
Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.
Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.
Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!
> When I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think you need to couple "offline interaction" with this criticism. As a neurodivergent person in more than one way I appreciate being able to interact with people that face similar challenges to me and understand me. The problem is that social media is increasingly designed to not facilitate that, but content distribution.
Yeah. Let's not fetishize "real world". Offline space is often boring and most people suck. There's a reason why we prefer to be looking at the screens. Having said that, I think that it makes sense to be more cautious about screen time and interact more with the offline space. Not because offline space is better, but because our brains are fried and they peceive online space to be better than it really is, we're literal addicts. I'm trying to teach myself that it's okay to be bored.
I remember when "Internet addiction" was a thing.
I guess when enough people get addicted to something, it's no longer considered to be an addiction.
When I am people watching, sometimes I am reminded of the TNG episode of star trek where everyone gets addicted to a game. Non-players grow concerned until they all succumb.
Maybe the very core of what it is to be human is to destroy ourselves.
Would be funny if the "great filter" is not nukes or some other weapon, but social media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
I've read that short story, but can't remember enough details to search for it.
Humans do find alien radio signals, but they keep going dark after a brief window; the narrator suspects why, because they witness fellow humans disappearing into simulations far more fun than reality could ever be.
Not quite the same concept, but The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (published in 1909, but still pretty relevant imo) is about where this all might lead, with humans living in almost total isolation and only communicating through "the machine", which mostly sounds like modern social media lol. It's terrifying. Also really demonstrates how static human nature actually is.
The Great Filter is just bullshit until we come across space ruins to prove that something has been filtering out civilizations. It is possible that we are just the "precursors" without any giants to stand upon the shoulders of.
Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
The absence is the evidence.
Being a precursor is not inconsistent with great filters, a great filter is why nobody else is there to be one.
Great filter is anywhere at all in the progress of life from pre-life chemistry to stable interplanetary expansion; filters behind us, for example multicellular life or having dry land so we can invent fire, are still potential great filters and they would leave no space ruins to find.
That said, my assumption is lots of little filters that add up. Eleven filters behind us each with 10% pass rates is enough to make us the peak of civilisation in this galaxy; eleven more between us and Kardashev III would make the universe seem empty.
"Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?"
The jury is still out on that one... failed "business" person who was also a "reality TV star" - and now appears to be in some level of dementia - currently in charge of the single biggest military-industrial complex on the planet...
> Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
I’d say we’ve already got measurable statistics. When half of genz isn’t dating or married, it’s signaling trouble.
https://aibm.org/commentary/gen-zs-romance-gap-why-nearly-ha...
Now, we can discuss if that’s good or bad for the planet, but it’s not great for humanity.
Is there any evidence that the fall in birth rates is caused by humans having produced reality TV shows?
I’d say there is better evidence to suggest the fall in birth rates is predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children, and enabling the invention of the single mother who survives on government largesse. Separating church and state appears to be contributing at least to some extent.
Single mothers, and women having their first child in their late 20’s or 30’s, appear to be maladaptive.
> predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children
Who is “telling them that”? Society by allowing them to open a checking account? Women’s suffrage? The reality is that other than the most privileged, a modern family can’t afford to function without both parents working. I assume you’re for raising the minimum wage to allow a family to run on a single income with multiple children? Or your solution is to send us back to the dark ages and remove womens rights?
> enabling the invention of the single mother who survives on government largesse.
There’s literally nobody who has kids as a single mother with the goal of raising them on welfare, that might be the single most ridiculous statement in this thread.
> Separating church and state appears to be contributing at least to some extent.
The Russian Orthodox Church is government sponsored. How’s their birth rate going?
It's definitely not true that both parents need to work. I know many families where only one parent has an income, and it is a very low income (one works as a mover for example) and they manage to eat and live etc.
Do they live upper middle class on this income? No. But they do live and have multiple children.
And I can guarantee they’re on government assistance because I know what a “mover” makes, and I know what diapers and formula cost, and they aren’t paying for multiple children on that salary alone.
I can promise you they are not. One of the families in question doesn't even get their tax credits because they are too far behind on filing. It's just the mover income. They have to make it work and since they must, they do
They don't buy formula obviously and they cloth diaper with used stuff from marketplace. To cover the two examples you gave
What's your point? We should all aspire to this?
I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs. I never found it all that funny given that it was a reality for my family.
> We should all aspire to this?
Yes, we should all aspire to have our children's mother at home during the child's developmental years rather than letting it be a string of minimum-wage strangers. If you can't manage that, oh well, it happens... but that's the ideal that we should all want. And wouldn't it be a hell of a world, where the single income could support such a family?
>I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs.
Someone above asked "who was telling them X". Well, in your case, it was 90s sitcoms. Not just your case, everyone's really. Sitcoms have been used to negatively portray what should be ideals since at least the 1970s.
Maybe think for a second from the perspective of a couple or woman who WANT to have children. The problems they face in today's economy where both people need to work full-time just to survive are huge, and it seems even crazier to add the time and money costs of a child, let alone several.
The way to change all of that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with economic and labor policy
Society decided it was OK to have the top 1% control 27% or all wealth and the top 10% control 60%, and allow companies to pay wages so low that a person working full-time cannot even get out of poverty, so 25%+ of the workers at the largest employer qualify for food benefits (and the employer even gives employees seminars how to get benefits), while the leaders/owners of those companies rake in more billions every year.
Society decided it was OK to make sure health care is expensive, incomplete, and bankrupting for any unexpected event.
Society decided it was the mothers who are responsible for all childcare and provide only minimum assistance for critical needs like prenatal care, and day-care.
You want more babies? Make just a few changes
Change requirements so corporations are required to compensate their employees merely the way the original US minimum wage was specified (including in the 1956 Republican Party Platform): So a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education. Recognize that the companies trying to exploit their workers by paying less so their full-time employees need govt benefits to feed themselves are the ones exploiting welfare, and do not have a viable business model, they have an exploitation model.
Add making healthcare sufficient and affordable for all, including children and support for daycare and the time and effort to raise children.
Change those things, and instead of a couple looking at making an already hugely insecure future even more insecure by having children, they would see an opportunity to confidently embark on building a family without feeling like one misfortune or layoff could put them all in the street.
Do you have a citation that the US federal minimium wage ever had the objective that "a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four" because I can't find it in the Wikipedia entry[1] or other top level search results. I also don't see this idea in the 1956 Republican Party platform[2]. At best from reading a few other sources it looks like at its peak in the late 1960s it would have been enough to keep a family of three above the poverty line (though that hardly implies they could afford a mortgage and higher education).
> a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Yes, there will likely be that phenomenon, but will it occur faster than the approx 2% level of optimum inflation?
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
Why not choose GDP? Or meat consumption? You could choose any pair of correlated variables.
Using “The invention of the single mother” is a poor way of explaining away Bad Marriages and relationships.
Also, there was a UN report which came out that showed that a major factor behind people choosing not to have children, globally, is money.
Money has been shown convincingly to not be an important factor. Please read about it for a while and you will quickly see that it’s a discredited argument, not least because poor people everywhere have always had more children. Also, fertility rates are falling everywhere, especially in countries that are becoming wealthier.
Perhaps money alone is not a reliable factor, and there are certainly confounding variables, such as poor people having low access to healthcare including contraception and education about options and how to use it.
More important than money is economic security, the ability to expect a reasonable long-term access to a sound source of income.
Having to worry whether you'll be laid off next week and not be able to get new work, and have that worry be constant over a decade is a real discouragement to having children.
Having a stable situation in life is vastly underrated, and not easily measured by current net worth or income.
Eh?
> Money not infertility, UN report says: Why birth rates are plummeting
> Roughly 40 percent of respondents cited economic barriers – such as the costs of raising children, job insecurity and expensive housing – as the main reason for having fewer children than they would like
> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/10/money-not-infertili...
That’s what I am saying: this is just utter bullshit that almost every other study disproves, as well as a quick check of the reality around the world! Hence why I suggested to read more on the topic.
Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior. People almost always say what they think is right not what they really feel. I suspect a lot of people don’t have kids because they are afraid of having ugly or stupid or sick children… would you say it out loud if that was the case for you? I am sure you would not and you would rationalize it as being about money somehow.
> Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior
1) The surveys are designed to figure out these things
2) Even if the surveys are not, the shift y-o-y, from previous statements, providing trend data. Respondents can always choose different masking reasons for their choices. Pricing becoming a standout reason speaks volumes.,
3) If you reject both those points, you can postulate any theory you like, and there will never been current data to back it up. At this point we can assume any reason, as a matter of preference not as a matter of fact.
>Is there any evidence that the fall in birth rates is caused by humans having produced reality TV shows?
No, but there's is evidence that the fall in birth rates is affected by all the content slop people spend their times consuming instead of talking to one another and fucking one another... and the ideas that slop puts into their heads are even worse...
What evidence? The demographic timelines dont add up.
Doesn't it? TV got mass adoption midpoint around 1955 - around which time when the fertility trends start sloping down (and incidentaly around the time Putnam puts the start of the decline in social capital in the US in the seminal "Bowling Alone").
It then stabilizes around 1980 and starts a second downward slop around 2010 - the time of smartphones and social media.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birt...
I appreciate that the generalization and time windowing will be sufficient explanation for some. I don't believe this is an accurate accounting.
> I’d say there is better evidence to suggest the fall in birth rates is predominantly caused by telling women they should prioritise education and career over children
I'd say the evidence is inconclusive and could just as easily be explained by not telling men they needed to take on their share of the burden at home now that their women were no longer trapped at home doing unpaid, manual labor all day.
Instead, we're letting people say "gay sex includes giving a woman an orgasm instead of a pregnancy" (an actual thing I've heard a right-wing influencer say right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH6uydPCX8Q ) and encouraging men to be more selfish and anti-woman.
Also who cares about a fall in birth rates? We need a fall in birth rates. Above replacement rate is mathematically unstable in the long term.
When people complain bout "a fall in birth rates," they're a mix of capitalists who need their profits to ever increase, and white supremacists who mean WHITE people need to have more babies because society is too BROWN now.
We're about to have hella unemployment from too many people for too few jobs. We need fewer people.
Your post, youtube link and quote is quite ironic given the title of this thread.
You link to a youtube podcast of kids stating things as if they are facts, its just a podcast. I've never heard these things actually said anywhere. It means nothing.
Then your quote is taken out of context and a new culture war is created, well done.
It's interesting how common the theme of "a man being into women is gay" is among the right-wing circles, though usually it's hidden in the subtext and not just spelled out in clear like this.
Caused by allowing women the same choices that men have. Would you rather they not have the choice?
Yes I'm sure reality TV did it and not cost of living meaning they have little money for entertainment and definitely will never purchase their own home.
If "will never purchase their own home" was a reason to not have kids, many more people in previous generations would've been childless.
What has changed is expectations. The room I rented in my final year of university, and that was only 20 years ago, would (I think) no longer be legal: too poorly insulated. Very cheap though, I think it was £40 a week? Even after adjusting that for inflation since then, that was cheap. But it's (I think?) no longer possible.
Expectations for things that can be bought have gone up faster than our ability to buy them. We didn't used to all expect to be able to fly somewhere on holiday. We didn't used to all expect to have a phone — and I don't just mean a smartphone, or even a mobile phone, my first partner was a bit older than me, born in the 70s, their family didn't have a landline. All the streaming services are expensive, I grew up with 4 free-to-air channels and no internet (not even a dialup modem) let alone broadband that you need to stream video, no cable TV or satellite TV. Smart bulbs for mood lighting can quickly become expensive, I grew up in an upper middle class house and yet it had one, singular, dimming switch for the incandescent bulb it took. A microwave was a fancy accessory, not standard, when I was a kid. It all adds up.
Also, our expectations for relationships have gone up faster than humans could ever change, as our expectations follow not reality but rather perception. Sure, the perception was already off when I was young, we had unrealistic body goals in high-gloss magazines and Hollywood glamour and unrealistic romances in stories and unrealistic sex in porn, but even with that the quantity one could consume was relatively limited… and now we have the highest-rated content from our always-on social media accounts, A/B tested to be more appealing than reality, and even when it isn't AI-enhanced or photoshopped, it's still the final cut to the cutting room floor of having to deal with flawed real people.
Yes, college aged men who aren’t in a relationship are avoiding pursuing one because they’re thinking about whether or not they’ll be able to afford a house some day. It definitely has nothing to do with social media and dating apps breaking human interaction.
Please keep the sarcasm on Reddit.
>Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
And it was. We're now even further down in that downfall, and most content is "reality TV" style now: influencers, parasocial relationships, IG, TikTok, OF, news vlogs and podcasts that are about the anchor an not the content, and so on...
What do you mean?
Jerry Springer theatrics has infiltrated politics, and I would judge our civilization as being in a downward trend as a result.
The “Great Filter” is the fact that humans are nowhere near as remarkable nor “intelligence” as necessary as we want to think
One could argue modern social media like Tiktok and Snapchat is an evolution of reality TV, in app/smartphone form.
Any real-world side effects of Reality TV?
Arguably the election of Trump.
maybe there's no core just unchecked forces due to technology removing barriers
yeah evolutionarily we gained all this power to survive, now that we've got that figured out the drive to survive has been turned in its head
now we need to figure out a way to survive our survival instincts in the world of abundance and safety we have created
imo we have to conquer our own biology because we are too amped up as a species to choose temperance
i don't know much but 90% of medical advice is basically, drop modern life on a regular basis (walk, stay outside, hug, lift, touch, eat raw, eat few)..
it would be weird if the complex biosphere environment that made our ancestor struggle was also a key balancer that we can't replace
The "eat raw" part seems at least partially misguided, since our ancestors apparently started cooking the heck out of their environment pretty early, didn't consume much unprocessed dairy until very late, and the raw food they did consume tended to carry less pathogens than modern mass-produced food.
The greatest part of the rest, however, appears to be true. I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not. Low-processed food makes my digestive system measurably happier, walking lots makes me unreasonably healthier, being among trees and mountains calms me to a crazy degree.
But then we did spend like 98% of our evolutionary history since the last big speciation event as hunter-gatherers, and we gotta be as adapted to that as any critter is to their lifestyle.
At this point I kind of expect to find perversions the social patterns and structures of hunter-gatherer groups embedded in the dark patterns that make social media so insidious, much like exploiting our built-in craving for scarce energy-dense nutrition made Coca Cola etc. the economic giants they are. I just don't know enough about the social structures of the deep past to spot these things yet. There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature on that either, so I'm not sure how I'll get there, but I'd like to.
> I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not.
I'm lacking words to describe how I feel reading the same comment from many people online. I too felt weird seeing how much more peaceful and healthier simple bike commute made me. I remember coming home sweaty and running across angry car drivers pissed to wait for 3 seconds more than necessary in the comfort of their seat, while me doing all these efforts .. all calm, even joyful.
Same for food, it's hard to unplug from all sweet processed food, but after a month you realize your body doesn't need it. less but better food, helps sleep too..
Totally agree regarding biking, walking, trees, mountains, and will add lakes. Though it does only lightly touch on social structures of traditional societies, you may enjoy reading "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter" by Joseph Henrich. I also found classic texts of social and political anthropology to be very worthwhile for understanding human societies. Ted Lewellen's "Political Anthropology: An Introduction" is a good starting point.
Cooked food is easier to digest. The discovery of cooking is what allowed early hominids to grow larger brains (which have higher calorie demands) and become modern humans.
Hey now... We have to evolve somehow. The folks that continue to reproduce in this technological dystopia are passing on their "just ignore social media" (or more likely, "get bored with social media") genes to the next generation.
In a 1000 years, social media will recommend people stop spending time outdoors and warn against the dangers of non-ultraprocessed food.
Power outages at places where young people are forced to gather will be engineered in order to facilitate breeding as their minds will be completely starved of anything else to do while their hormones rage due to the aphrodisiac aerosols pumped into the building where they remain captive.
right essentially drop everything that's short circuiting our pleasure centers and do it the old fashioned way
we evolved to live in our environment and modernity has involved a lot of removing ourselves from it
Nothing has been conquered. Technology is providing a behavioral selection process that is effectively self-culling the populace and is going to make the mass adaptation to the next century of climate change much more bearable for all
we have certainly conquered caloric density, reducing individual caloric expenditure, and eliminating environmental hazards (though it's not evenly distributed) to the point where pockets of the population are dangerously sedentary and overfed (and thus life expectancy is declining from a previous peak)
You are being downvoted, but I am wondering if people, who are doing it are doing it reflexively just because they disagree and not because they thought it through. There is an argment to be made that there is a level of self-preservation that disappears when things become too sanitized. Case in point, during one of FL issues, people were panicking over gas and -- some -- were putting gas in unapproved containers without giving much thought over whether it is a good idea since gas can do a lot more than just power cars. Granted, some of the silly behavior is a direct result of social media egg ons/clout chase and weird level Tyler Durden accellerationist vibes, but some people simply don't know.. or care to know.
I am not saying it is a good thing, but there is something to be said about current distracted humans operating internal combustion engine. Then again, my dad already told me it is all going to hell, because I can't change oil...
No, our nature is to satiate our dopamine system. That system evolved to keep us fed, nourished, and to make us make friends and belong and have sex to make more humans. The problem is that we are now so smart and clever that we can start learning how the dopamine system works and hacking it.
This isn't new. We've been doing it for a long time with booze, porn, drugs, sexual excess, gambling, pointless consumerism, certain kinds of religious fervor, endless things.
But almost all of those things are self-limiting. They're either costly, dangerous, in limited supply, or physically harmful enough to our health that we shy away from them and taboos develop around them.
Addictive digital media may actually be more dangerous than those things precisely because it is cheap, always available, endless, and physically harmless. As a result it has no built-in mechanism that limits it. We can scroll and scroll and chase social media feedback loops forever until we die.
AI slop feeds are going to supercharge this even more. Instead of human creators we will have AI models that can work off immediate engagement feedback and fine tune themselves for each individual user in real time. I'm quite certain all the antisocial media companies are working on this right now. Won't be long before they start explicitly removing human creators from the loop and just generating endless customized chum with ad placement embedded into it.
Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not either for psychological/neurological reasons or because they are exhausted and stressed and unable to summon the energy. Humans do not have infinite willpower. So I've been predicting for a while that eventually we're going to heavily regulate or tax this space.
This concerns me too due to the free speech implications and the general risk of overreacting and overcorrecting. It'll be tempting for politicians to regulate or tax only the platforms they don't like, or to use the regulatory mechanism to crack down on legitimate speech by grouping it in with addictive chum. We've seen similar things with attempts to regulate porn or hate speech. But it's coming. I have little doubt. I think we'll see this when GenZ and GenA start entering politics.
It's really still shocking to me. If you went back in time and told me in, say, 2006, that our engagement-hacking would be so successful that it became an X-risk to humanity, I'm not sure I'd believe you. I never would have believed how effective this stuff could be. It's just a damn screen for god's sake! I think a lot of people are still in denial about this problem because it seems so absurd that a touch screen can addict people as well as fentanyl, but it's true. I see it around me all the time.
Edit:
My preferred way to go about reeling this back in would be to strike at the root and start taxing advertising the way we tax booze, drugs, gambling, and other vices. Advertising revenue is the trunk of this tree. The entire reason these systems are created is to keep people staring so ads can be pushed at them. Take that away and a lot of the motive to build and run these things goes away.
Another, which we're already seeing, is to age-restrict antisocial media. Young minds are particularly vulnerable to these tactics, more so than adults, and all addiction pushers try to addict people early.
Lastly, we could start campaigns to educate people. We need schools teaching classes explaining to kids how these systems addict and manipulate them and why, and public PSAs to the same effect. It needs to be treated like a health issue because it is.
Taxes, education, and age restriction is how we almost killed cigarettes in the USA, so there is precedent for these three things together working.
We also need to be a lot more precise in our language. The problem is not the Internet, phones, computers, "tech," AI, etc. The problem is engineering systems for engagement, specifically. If you are trying to design a system to keep people staring at a screen (or other interface) for as much time as possible, you are hurting people. What you're doing is in the same category as what the Sackler family did with oxycontin. Engagement engineering is a predatory destructive practice and the people who do it are predators. I think it's taken a long time for people to realize this because, again, it's just a damn screen! It's shocking that this is so effective that we need to have this societal conversation.
I don’t have anything to add, but just wanted to thank you for this insightful and deeply thought out response. The solutions you list do look like they would work and I hope we find the political will, sooner rather than later.
Truly one of the best comments I've read in a long time.
We need to normalize calling it antisocial media.
Patrick Boyle eventually comes to a similar conclusion in his video about global population decline - https://youtu.be/ispyUPqqL1c?si=7jUgVBkOvLHluPAR - but includes lots of graphs and other interesting factlets.
* warning for Americans: not suitable for those offended by sarcasm
I agree that advertising is the root of it, but some people might still pay for modern social media. They used to pay for porn, before it was available for "free" (ad supported). Some still do. I pay for YouTube to avoid the ads. I don't think I would pay for Facebook or Tiktok though. Possibly an uninformed opinion as I've never used those platforms.
Paid media is better. If you pay for a monthly subscription or for individual pieces of media, revenue is no longer tied to “engagement.” If you pay for Netflix and watch three hours a month or thirty, it makes little difference.
Ads tie revenue directly to time spent on the screen, and that is the root of all evil.
As another poster mentioned, ad revenue is often higher than what you can reasonably get with subscriptions. That’s where taxing advertising would help.
The $ from people paying for subscriptions and the $$$$$$ from ad revenue, is too much of a bridge to cross.
There's no way to reel it back. You said it here though:
> Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not
This is simply a genetic selective filter that will destroy some people while others make it through, and there will need to be an overall adaptation against finding fake slop debilitatingly addictive. Like drugs, alcohol, porn, food, opiates, etc and other things some can resist and are able to abstain while some can't. I used to worry so much about these things in aggregate but I realized it's too pervasive to eliminate and impossible to change people's nature when it comes to resisting it or even worrying about it as a problem to avoid, so simply resisting better than others and having children that hopefully are able to overcome and avoid by way of finding more value in real experiences is the only successful outcome.
If one has to really really think hard about and try really really hard to overcome, then they're probably just not going to make it... and we all know for many people avoiding addictions comes easy. This chasm of reaction to stimulus means there will be divergent outcomes. It can't be any other way.
This is provably wrong. Preventative public health measures against for instance cigarettes and nicotine reduce uptake, reduce consumption and increase quitting. [1] In the case of smoking, this also cut second-hand harm/death from smoking. Similarly, preventative measures have first order and second order benefits for alcohol and other drug consumption.
Just giving up on those who show higher likelihood for addiction is a travesty. Failure to eliminate an addiction is no reason to give up reducing its harms, both to the person themselves, family and friends, and wider society.
[1]: https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/172
It appears that the current content systems have some correlation in lowering the fertility rate; in that case they will be self-limiting after all, just not in the way OP mentioned about the other vices. It will be interesting indeed how things look after a generation or two.
<< It can't be any other way.
This seems ridiculously fatalistic and weirdly binary way of looking at things. Best I can start with is 'why?', because to a simple person like me it could be any number of ways..
Thank you for explaining the issue with such clarity. This is one of the best comments I’ve read for a while.
My hypothesis is: Humans are social and need social interaction to thrive. However we are not wired for the diversity of interacting with 7 Billion people and all the derivatives.
We thrive in small groups where there is high trust social networks and generally being around people with the same culture and belief system.
But humans don't, in any meaningful sense, interact with 7 billion people when they use social media any more than they interact with the entire population of their city whenever they go out. And most people living in any reasonably sized city - to use that as a real world analogue for social media - aren't only interacting with small, high trust social networks of the same culture and beliefs, and they manage just fine.
Your hypothesis (which seems more and more common) seems to me to be a "just so" story, but it doesn't correlate with what I've observed of real human behavior.
Your reply is flawed
1) People choose to live in the same city so they have that in common
2) 7B don't all interact together, thats not the point. The point is that its random who you talk to as most social media is anonymous.
Combine this and you have low trust + low chance of having similar viewpoints/culture/beliefs.
Manage just fine does not mean everyone is happy, and in these major areas like NYC people always seem to congregate with the groups they share the most in commong with.
> so much content, it can keep me continually engaged
I find the total opposite to be true. I desperately want more engaging content to feed the gooey goblin in my brain but the overwhelming majority doesn't cut it and this was before AI.
Almost every show I see on netflix, tiktok I glance at, or reddit post is absolute unflavored mash potatoes. Content for content's sake. Feed me more content like scavengers reign and less frankenstein remakes or super hero slop.
Also, we might have become spoiled by having found content that aligns with our interests at all. Like an Overton window, we have been slowly realigning our desires to expect better and even better content.
We truly might be addicted and are slowly becoming unsatisfied with the simpler, more nuanced pleasures in life.
There's way more good content available than an employed adult human has time to consume. I have watched five great seasons of TV this year (Frieren, Apothecary Diaries, Dandadan, Blue Box, Stranger Things, all on Netflix) and zero movies (no time with kids!), and have read twelve good books (ranging from prize-winning literature to incredible graphic novels). I have zero time for anything else besides two other hobbies, both of which involve the creative act: coding, and writing fanfiction.
When I hear "there's nothing good available," I assume the person is a dullard. Like where are you looking that you can't throw a rock and hit something worth watching?!
Do you really believe the latest season of Stranger Things is « great tv »?
It tastes like bland mashed potatoes to me.
This person gets it.
One reason I enjoy anime as much as I do is because most of these stories are written by a single person with maybe an assistant or two and an editor, they're not designed by committee.
I somewhat enjoy Stranger Things but it's falling into the space where I can write the next line of dialog in my head for whole scenes. Whereas it started out poking fun at tropes like doing exposition or relationship development at moments of maximum danger it's turned into a long sequence of Obligatory Scenes that feel increasingly forced.
> a long sequence of Obligatory Scenes that feel increasingly forced
You're describing mainstream entertainment in general. I started noticing this with the storyboard-as-film, action-by-numbers "Raider's of the Lost Ark". (I won't even waste my time on super hero films.)
Hard disagree. All the examples you gave are anime with the exception of Stranger Things which suggests a rather narrow view of content.
It isn't that good stuff doesn't exist only that a majority is derivative and uninspired. Anything that does catch a spark is milked dry.
> majority is derivative and uninspired
A lot of good creations are derivations or remix of older ideas and they don’t have to be uninspired: West Side Stiry, Ulysses, so much of jazz music…
It blows my mind that anyone can consider Stranger Things to be great anything. It's utter dross. It's like our standards have dropped massively over the last 50 years in almost every way, in literature, music, journalism, politics, movies, and TV.
I'm interested in the book recommendations!
Maybe the problem is that you're looking for content to consume, instead of art to enjoy and participate with. The distinction is important because how you frame a problem changes how you solve it.
We need the Butlerian Jihad
Brian Herbert reference detected, opinion ignored.
Perhaps one could frame it as "The Self under Siege".
https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...
Social media is bad but this might be being slightly dramatic IMO
The original opiate for the people criticism was leveled against religion by Karl Marx:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/6pontu/wha...
;-)
Very often misquoted as being a blunt attack on religion, but people often just cut out the second half of the quote --
"opiate of the masses... heart of the heartless world"
Marx was despairing at the heartlessness of the condition of working class people in industrial slums, people one generation or less removed from the flight from rural landless dispossession and starvation into the polluted cities and factories and tiny apartments in slums in search of survival. He saw religion as one tool people used to salve the pain, to reduce the suffering.
Far more complicated than "religion bad, we should ban it, mmkay"
There's probably an analogy here around the "attention economy" and "social media."
Look for root causes. If you turn everything and everyone into a commodity -- "market yourself!" -- don't be surprised when the consumptive model takes over all consciousness.
The commodity form is the [post|hyper]modern religion.
... This is relevant how?
I found it interesting, etymology of the phrase
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed with a measure of a restraint. It needs to be clear we can be reasoned with.
So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
Dump advertising into the ocean. The motivation for maximizing engagement on social media is to maximize ad impressions for revenue. Every algorithm, every dark pattern, every UX tweak, is aimed toward that sole end. The issue cannot be fixed by regulating social media itself; it is the enormous monetary incentive that is the root of the problem and until the flow of money is choked off, corporations will still doggedly pursue that revenue.
So what exactly are you proposing - that we encourage all users to only pay for ad-free versions of every service they use, instead of choosing an ad-supported version? Try to outlaw adverting globally? What is an ad - a sign for a company? A company’s circular? A sign for company with a logo next to it? (To understand what should be forbidden.)
> every algorithm … every UX tweak
Actually, is the whole comment sarcasm? Or is the proposal to ban algorithms/UX changes? Or just such things if they increase sales on a product page, etc?
Hmm, how about taxing ad impressions per user, per social media site, per day on an increasing scale? It remains possible for a social media site to remain profitable but makes it rapidly unprofitable to show too many ads. It also incentivizes the social media site to push the user toward paid service with no ads that can be more profitable than the maximum number of ads they are allowed to spew at free users.
A good start would be to make it a criminal offence to sell the right to execute code on somebody's device without their consent. And to tax into oblivion any service that can't function without such consent.
We can work our way up to eliminating all targeted advertising later, lets start with the stuff that's indistinguishable from malware.
:-D I do love the image of hurling GPU’s into the sea!
My suggestion was much more modest. Put down the phone and delete your socials. Disengagement is the ultimate act of rebellion.
I don't think history is on your side there. Disengagement might be a small first step, but for no rebellion worth mentioning was disengagement in any way ultimate.
Rebellion is about stripping people of power. The disengagement you're describing, if not followed up by a different sort of reengagement, would merely be getting out of the power's way.
I'd love to lobby for "the right" to opt out of AI features.
When I google search "why is the sky blue" , it spins up an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful for simple, known answers.
When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again. Google was a pioneer of search indexing, and now it seems like we don't attempt to index answers at all. They're spinning up an LLM every time because they're trying to run up the AI "adoption" metrics.
I'd love to be able to ask for simple things, like the address of the local restaurant 3 blocks away, without firing up a GPU in an AI data center.
I don't always want to "talk with" a computer. Sometimes I just want to "use" a computer. Maybe that makes me a fool. Or an old man yelling at clouds.
> When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again
I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states.
Got the exact same answer.
These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.
For me, google searches are defaulting to "AI mode"
I just asked it the same question on 2 different devices.
The question I asked was harder than why is the sky blue. I asked it "who was Edmund Fitzgerald".
One device, it gives me the ship. The other device, it gives me the person. I can copy/paste the answers here, if we want to compare.
Again, this could happen because I used "too hard" of a question. But I'm definitely getting 2 different answers.
You can of course, do this will almost every LLM. I can ask copilot 3 times and get conflicting answers each time.
Maybe for some types of questions that's beneficial. But for simple "what is X" questions, it's not as useful.
I think it’s easier than that. We can literally start the revolution from our beds:
1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”
2. For every social media account you have: close it.
3. Profit
> 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”
Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media.
If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
<< Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.
Saying something in a social setting when someone is behaving inappropriately for that social setting is reasonable.
Pulling out your cell phone to post your own angry rants about how your cousins were using social media is just pointless grandstanding.
I honestly disagree. I would like to think I planted some seeds today.
Necessary maybe, but insufficient. Shame other plebs all you like, the predatory tech isn't going away until we start ruining rich people over it.
Is Hacker News considered social media, or only sites like x/twitter/mastodon/bluesky?
Interesting point, because Hacker News doesn't serve ads, and doesn't have any personalized algorithms, yet it's quite compelling and I waste a lot of time here.
Everything seems to be social media for a certain age group. Even stuff that I'd call messaging applications.
Is the problem really social media though? Without some kind of long-distance-capable social medium that we participate in directly, how are we going to know when the news is lying to us? Social media's alternatives also can't resist corruption, if we give up this fight, we'll lose that one too.
I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.
>How are we going to know when the news is lying to us?
On every day of the week ending in 'y'. People did know that before social media I'm pretty sure, and they still do.
You want to know whether something is true? Stop taking peoples word, demand capital 'P' Proof, and infer exclusively based on that proof.
Capital P proof is great if you want to know whether a topological space is separable, but if you want to know if you should stop paying your taxes because maybe they're causing more harm than good then you're going to have to rely on something besides capital P proof. You're going to have to rely on induction and probability. More vs less data matters quite a bit in such places.
Sources can include people you've never met, have no reason to lie, and happened to be in an opportune position to contribute to the sort of lowercase p proofs that you need.
If we can fix social media there can be many such people. If not, there will be necessarily fewer, and they'll have to be replaced by people for whom addressing the public with new information is their job. The latter sort are high value targets for corruption. As long as they're worried about keeping that job, they have to also worry about who they upset with their information. You're necessarily going to get weaker lowercase-p proofs from such people.
That's not to say that we'll have no tools for keeping power in check, but we will have fewer, which means their abuses will be more frequent and more severe.
give me an example of anything you can ‘P’rove and I’ll easily ‘P’rove that you are wrong
I exist.
I see no proof of that but I’ll believe someone telling me that you do ;)
I have given an example of something that I can prove, and you have failed to "easily" disprove it. Disappointing given the cockiness of your challenge.
And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)
The challenge was not that you prove it to yourself, Mr. Descartes. It was that you prove it to bdangpublic. It doesn't look like you've done so to me.
You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".
That's moving the goalpost. The challenge was not to prove it to them, but to give an example of a provable thing, them claiming they would be easily able to prove the negative(or to prove that I cannot prove it? The wording is ambigous).
Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun.
But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.
hehehehe exactly :)
short sentence like this is also telltale sign of AI-generated content ;)
It is in the distant future still (if we ever get there without apocalypse first) but I think the goal was set out to be, from the very first bits of digital data, is to completely transition ourselves to a digital world. Living it in parallel will make less sense if Earth conditions get worse, and even less in space or on a hostile planet. In a digital world possibilities become limitless, disabilities, distances, shortcomings of the mind eliminated. Once you can't see a difference, will it matter if something is "real"? Sure, it can also become a hell and inhumane much easier, but this doesn't make it a less compelling dimension.
Looking through this lens, fighting, limiting internet usage is akin to moving to the rainforest to avoid capitalism - lone rebelling acts in the wrong direction of history, a temporary, partial victory for the few who dare this hassle.
Time is better spent to make this emerging space better, for everyone.
Given to the direction we're going, I don't believe this digital world will be one in which we're free either.
That sounds like work.
It has been well theorized by A. Dugin : Wére now in the era of full realization / triumph of postmodernity. After having crushed all its 20th-century adversaries, western liberalism and its ideology of universal 'progress' will destroy everything that makes us truly human
Dugin? That anti-scientific maniac? He is no different to some Western liberals equally hating hormones' influences into different genders down to orientation methods. And, yes, that means there's a spectrum, but no one can't deny these differences.
We’ve started instituting a “no phones” policy when the kids have sleepovers to try to combat this at least a little bit, and have constant conversations about why things like Instagram are toxic and we should just try to spend our time enjoying life.
Obviously I’m also posting here while I wait in the car waiting to pick someone up, but I actively make an effort to unplug on a regular basis.
HN is my guilty pleasure as well.
isn't HN more like professional news/discussion place?
is it considered social media?
This is absolutely social media. And like all addicts, people here loudly proclaim that it's less toxic.
Whether or not is it indeed less toxic is up for debate.
It's highly censored.
And it has the little Righthink number in the corner that goes up when you make Righthink.
Maybe. But that Righthink number has also reminded me when I am being too combative (trollish) online.
It's also fun to throw caution to the wind with a "fuck it" and just let your comment fade away after having ranted at the clouds.
> isn't HN more like professional news/discussion place?
I see enough racist and misogynist comments here to know that isn't true. And that's not even considering the low-knowledge comments offered up as expertise.
I long for the days of a Slashdot where you could filter out anyone with a UID greater than 200K or so, and it'd be nothing but 20yr experts in IT dropping rugged after rugged of tremendously insightful analysis. (Granted there was also plenty of GNAA frist psot stuff.)
>I long for the days of a Slashdot where you could filter out anyone with a UID greater than 200K or so, and it'd be nothing but 20yr experts in IT dropping rugged after rugged of tremendously insightful analysis.
If you had a similar filter here it'd likely have the the opposite effect.
What:s the difference between reddit and HN beyond the form?
It seems to be obviously social media to me
The lack of subreddits is a big difference because it inhibits users coagulating into subgroups. Reddit also allows people to be banned from subreddits by subreddit owners/mods which leads to groupthink more.
HN is one large subreddit with it's own groupthink.
The content is also different. Reddit uses AI agents to populate feeds to generate user engagement.
The main difference is no personalized algorithm ranking content to increase engagement.
The algorithm has consumed reels/shorts/tiktok/insta. Being extremely inflammatory is rewarded there.
Algorithms don't define social medias, it's just the latest iteration from the main ones.
Is BeReal not a social media because there's no algorithmic feed?
HN is definitely social media, even if it isn't explicitly labeled as such. Ostensibly Instagram is just a photo sharing site, but we all know it is social media.
There’s that old joke about how everything with an input form is a social media platform.
I think in 12 months we're not going to know the difference unless we put in some serious effort. I use AI quite a lot and it's great, but don't like it for 'media' in general. Personally, I don't want to support AI generated audio, video, or text content. This past week I came across an Instagram account, found it interesting and followed it. Admittedly it was some high-level cookie cutter self-help stuff. Easy to catch your attention. Eventually I dug into it a bit more and it was 100% AI generated. I'd missed it completely and there were no comments suggesting it was AI content either despite over 1m followers. If you want to be sure the media you are viewing is actually created by real people, algorithmic feeds are no longer an option. It will be interesting to see over the next year or two whether there is a large backlash and people start seeking out content they are positive is created by real people, or if that becomes a subculture and the masses are happy with their circus.
Maybe. I am saying this not to be contrarian, but I am seeing a rather specific pattern in some areas. Chatgpt used to be pretty decent in cross thread musings, but those got capped hard to the point that even wide recall invocation does not always work as intended. And that change wasn't just about resources. Similar stuff seems to be happening with various lawsuits on the 'creative' side.
All this makes me thing that while the capability may be there for those who want it, openly accessible stuff will be heavily nerfed. You know, just like now.
Maybe what I need is an AI agent to consume AI generated content on my behalf.
Then I can continue with my strong preference to direct my time and attention toward content generated, mostly, by my fellow humans.
You jest, but I would it if my AI agent suggested, "How about a book to read? Stay off the internet for a week—I picked up a used book on eBay for you that I think you'll enjoy. Don't worry, I paid for it by doing a little trading on the side."
> Maybe what I need is an AI agent to consume AI generated content on my behalf.
I use an AI powered tool to "listen" to podcasts and remove ads from them before I listen to the podcast myself.
[dead]
Once you see social media as an attention-extraction machine rather than a communication system, outsourcing creation to users starts to look like a temporary optimization, not the end state
> is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.
Which users? I typically dislike TikTok and other shorts but the platforms seem to be wildly popular even despite my opinions.
They don't have to like it they just need to engage with it.
As KMFDM once said: We want to stop reading magazines, stop watching TV, stop caring about Hollywood but we're addicted to the things we hate
In high school English class we had to present a "poem" of our choice, of any sort - which included music pieces (or whatever other format). The song you quoted (KMFDM - Dogma) was my choice. The assignment included handing out the poem and reading (or playing it) to the class... Uhh, needless to say this got a pretty interesting reaction, but to the credit of the teacher, she didn't stop the music (or confiscate the printed out lyrics I handed out to everyone) despite the various swear words and pretty interesting messages in the lyrics.
FWIW the lyrics are written by (and spoken word performed by) guest artist Nicole Blackman (according to https://www.discogs.com/release/73597-KMFDM-Xtort )
They only dislike it when they can tell it’s AI, but that’s becoming less and less of a possibility.
If the final step is then just AI watching their own AI-created content then I'm okay with it.
Meta has already introduced a dedicated app for exactly this: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/meta-launches-vibes-a-shor...
> Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume?
The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.
Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.
By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.
AI achieves many things for these platforms:
1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)
2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)
3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers
4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections
>> The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising.
This just isn't true. There was a time when we had a chronological feed, only containing content from friends and family, and no advertising. The business model end goal was always advertising but social media doesn't necessarily need to be for that purpose (e.g. the fediverse).
Well, I'd be careful about the "always", when Facebook and Twitter started out they understood virality but they did not understand monetization -- early on the likes of Zynga and King were making money off Facebook and it wasn't until Facebook was forced to go public and Sheryl Sandberg was running things that they figured out that they could capture the free publicity brands got on Facebook and sell it back to them.
Yes.
> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly."
There's nothing I can add to this.
You can: you can mention Slack and Discord. :( :( :(
signed, another dinosaur (with a flawless "inbox 0" track record at both work and home, for decades now)
LLMs are a new phase of this. This time, I think it will truly kill the open web and reroute all traffic to two or three websites.
I don't see how this will kill the web.
If anything, it might make it easier to find more of the older nerdier web that wasn't made for profit.
Also, there are so many people that are already so rabidly anti-AI that I'm certain they will form their own communities outside the mainstream.
And kill many apps, maybe even OSes.
When most of what a user can do can be done from one single UI, the low friction will win.
And since all the data must be sent to the service, and that a super intelligent AI analysis all this data, the spying that is already considered outrageous today will reach unprecedented level.
Now, associate that with the fact the last year people in charge of said systems kissed the ring of the power that be in the most disgusting way. Add what we learned about surveillance from 3 letters agency.
You get your dystopia. It's not an if now. It's a when.
We need to solve that problem now. Once we hit it, we will lose the ability to solve it.
And I'm not sure where you could go on earth to escape it.
Nor should you, digitally. Each ideation we have of how it can be further used to break our civil rights, is being used as a playbook to do exactly that. Warn your friends in person, but don't give the basilisk a free lunch.
>Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive.
>That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform.
Easily the best post on HN so far this year 2025, thanks.
Very messy situations that we're at the moment for our communications platform but sadly it's true.
> We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0."
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators.
Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult.
The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.
I think federation is interesting as a concept, but my time with Mastodon has revealed that even decentralized networks are just as full of outrage-centric entertainment and ragebait as the main networks.
I think “the algorithm” gets a lot of blame for mirroring the choices that people are making for themselves. Even when you remove any semblance of an algorithm people have no problem creating their own little worlds of outrage entertainment and rage bait.
I'm old enough to have been on the internet before social networks, back in the days of forums / bulletin boards. Even then there was always a new drama in the community. I feel it's human nature.
I agree with you, and with GP for that matter, I think this is both human nature AND we've been conditioned by algorithms to seek and produce this style of communication. I'm really hopeful we can eventually grow out of this.
I feel terrible for the kids currently growing up with tiktok, Instagram & al., I only hope we will build the social and legal framework to safeguard the next generations from this, until they reach a certain age at least.
Of course it is human nature. The question is what parts of human nature get catered to and amplified, and by how much.
Yeah, I think the article conflated a few points: I think the issue the author was having was that he thought that decentralized social networks were meant to be decentralized communication platforms, when they were meant to be decentralized content delivery platforms.
The problem isn't the decentralization, it's the choice of a goal. However, email, IRC, Matrix, etc all already exist, and are what the author wants, so I do see tbe article as a bit misguided.
I think what the author meant to say was "I thought ActivityPub was meant to be more like Matrix, but it's not, and I'm sad about that".
I don't think the article disagrees here? The issue is not control or decentralization, but consumption v. back and forth (communication).
>Having decentralized entertainment platforms
How? I don't even think decentralized is the appropriate term. They're distributed entertainment platforms in that they're protocol based, but regarding the distribution of content there's nothing in it that decentralizes reach. The social graph of Twitter and Mastodon could in principle be identical.
Malicious actors don't need to control algorithms. States running influence campaigns on say, Youtube or Facebook don't actually control any algorithm, they adapt their content to what does well on the platform. And they could equally do this, one could argue even more effectively, on the fediverse.
Saying the Fediverse solves top down influence is like thinking that Bitcoin solves wealth inequality. The distribution of the network is completely agnostic to the centralization of the content.
Each server on a federated platform has control over how content retrieved through ActivityPub is delivered to its users. A healthy federated network allows competitions between "algorithms" for the same content. The social graph can be identical, but how it's traversed differs.
Think about how platforms have algorithmic comment ranking now, where two users who open the same comment section can see different top comments. This is a corporation or state (think tiktok) directly influencing how someone sees what their community thinks.
I don't see the bitcoin comparison.
You seem to be agreeing with the article?
This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.
Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages?
Is that the gist of it?
> This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.
I'm curious if this message is new to many here?
What makes it feel "dramatic"? I get the impression people say something is "dramatic" when it doesn't really land or connect? Because when something punches me in the gut, I don't say "that was dramatic", I say "that was compelling".
I'm over 40, and these kinds of concerns (technology serving people's deeper needs rather than serving them up fleeting entertainment) has been on my radar for 15+ years. Back then, I was expecting to go into public administration, policy analysis, or "technology for good" to use what might be a naive phrase.
The more typical / appropriate word here would be "over-dramatic" or "melodramatic", not "dramatic".
I've noticed a funny tendency among some Fediverse passionates to have strong feelings about how others should be using it. Author says "We could not both be right," but that's rather antithetical to the value proposition of decentralized social media, IMO.
A healthy user-empowered ecosystem naturally has some fragmentation; that's a sign it's working as it should to accommodate different tastes and visions. You can't use the same metrics for judging monolothic systems driven by a central authority as decentralized ones.
I share many of the author's opinions on communication vs entertainment, but the framing around an intentionally open and flexible system like ActivityPub leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Not really.
The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you.
The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.
It's more like Usenet users complaining that NZB downloaders don't let their users read text posts. Nobody using an NZB downloader gives a fuck about text posts. They're not there to chat with their fellow humans, they're there to download files. Both the text posts and binary files are transmitted by the same substrate, NNTP, but the protocol clearly has multiple groups of people using it for very different purposes.
Comparing it to email is inappropriate, because email is addressed to you, and you get upset if email servers/clients drop emails. But newsfeeds are not addressed to you. Neither is RSS/Atom. ActivityPub, generally speaking, isn't either. How you choose to experience messages coming your way is up to you. This whole article is making the assumption that if you want something more different, e.g. Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy (Fediverse Instagram/YouTube/Reddit), it basically must also be Mastodon/Pleroma (Fediverse Twitter). Why must it?
In the article the author mentioned that it's possible to message him over several protocols, but that only one of them will actually deliver the message?
It's on the author to advertise how they'd like communicated with.
A phone number != an email address != a WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram account != a Twitter/Facebook/Mastodon/etc. handle != a specific handle on a specific Discord/Slack/IRC service != "I go to the Lamb and Flag in Punterby on Wednesdays, maybe see me there"
It's irrelevant whether a low level protocol or its clients deliver everything or not. What matters is human A reaching human B. If human B wants to be reached, they will tell people in advance what their communication preferences are. And they will recognise that not all communication methods are fungible nor want to be or can be made to be. You can't expect ActivityPub to have the same behaviour as SMTP any more than you could IRC.
What is the image sharing platform's criteria for "entertaining enough"? Is it whether or not the message is an image?
Yes but the author lumps all decentralized and/or social networks together when all he really means to talk about is ActivityPub specifically.
I mean, Gmail by default does silently hide spam from your inbox.
The app is not showing posts that don't contain a picture, but shows posts that do. So if you browse someone Mastodon account on Pixelfed, you will see just fraction of their posts.
https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway; but it shows that doing decentralised software is hard, because each actor can just do whatever they want.
Meanwhile this is the normal, expected, and well-received behavior on ATproto. Every platform defines its own lexicon and can optionally support others. It wouldn't make sense for a blogging platform like (for example) Leaflet to show Bluesky posts the same way it shows blog posts. And apps can be selective too: Skylight only shows video posts. It's exactly how it should be for a video app.
The "account" then is just the data on your PDS with as many views into it as someone wants to develop. If I'm browsing (viewing) an account (subset of data) through a platform or app devoted to one type of content (data), I only want to see that kind of content in the main timeline. I can always pull out something like ATExplore or PDSls if I want to see everything.
The complaint only makes sense for a protocol that expects you to make a new account for a new platform and has limited portability. It doesn't make sense when an "account" is just a view into data, no more morally compromised than an SQL query. I'm skeptical the movement to revive the dead half of ActivityPub that could enable similar functionality will go anywhere, but I am rooting for the folks behind it.
> nobody really uses Mastodon anyway
760 000 active users [1] beg to differ
[1]: https://mastodon-analytics.com/
Wow that is more than I thought, I take it back
edit: the graph is not great, it seems to have plateaued, but also not decreasing. Good for a decentralized protocol.
> I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway;
Me and all the (real human) people I follow on Mastodon disagree. Many well known people are on Mastodon. A lot of folks I used to follow on RSS are on Mastodon. For me, Mastodon is what killed RSS.[1]
[1] RSS was well and alive long after Google Reader shut down.
The author makes some solid points, and I don't love Uber the company, but I can't accept the notion that ridesharing is a shittier experience than taking taxis.
Only someone who willfully forgets how terrible taxis are could say that.
In Stockholm there is one taxi company that has always been better called “Taxi Stockholm”, quality cars with great experienced drivers and good service. It was a premium though. They have a good app as well.
Getting in anything else is variable, from good to being completely ripped off paying three times more and being driven all over the city to rack up miles. There are even services that make the signs on the cars look like Taxi Stockholm - so you get in the wrong car.
Ride sharing means that I can get in anything and at least get home in one of the shortest routes or not pay over what I should. Still prefer Taxi Stockholm.
In other cities ridesharing equalizes the experience.
Used to be. These days taxis offer the same (if not better) experience as ridesharing services - at least in cities where ridesharing services are available.
I have the exact opposite opinion.
Taxis were great, for both the consumer and Taxi driver.
I'm floored!
My experience pre-Uber was that cabs were never there when you need them, the cars were smelly and in bad shape, the rides were expensive, seatbelts were usually broken, and drivers were not particularly motivated to be civil, never mind kind.
I personally don't drink bottled water on principle, but in theory it's nice to know it's there if I'm suffering.
Are your local cabs just amazing? I'm open to it, but again... floored. This very well could be a regional difference.
Edit: I cannot believe that I forgot to mention that the entire taxi medallion system found in most cities was not only deeply corrupt and usually intimately connected with organized crime... but the ownership structure was such that they enabled some of the worst legal wage slavery rackets in the western world. You've had these deeply shady owners with dozens of medallions and fleets of easily replaced, mostly immigrant drivers who all seemed to be prepared to drive for decades before someday hopefully being able to buy their own car and then drive it until they die.
I dunno, man. Convince me I'm mistaken.
From what I've read Uber drivers aren't any better off. It's still a race to nowhere.
All the negatives you described about the old structure still exist, it's just Uber skimming of the top now.
I share your well-deserved dislike of Uber, that's an easy sell.
Just speaking from my own experience here, it's really difficult to make a compelling case that from the customer's perspective it's just objectively nicer to take an Uber.
It's cheaper, cleaner, they will find you on quiet side streets, and yes, the evil water bottles are there if you want them.
I just wish that there was a more societally beneficial third option, since VR telepresence hasn't taken off outside of the furry raver community.
I think both of you are right but looking at different sections of the trend.
In general, taxi business is very tough and tend to became worse over time due to the systems in play.
Old taxi services quality varied widely, i.e. in some areas they went into shit already while in some they were still great.
Living in a big city with pretty lax taxi regulations I experienced whole range with some providers being top quality.
Uber injected billions into the market attracting a whole lot of new people to start doing taxi gigs, which made quality much better for some regions where regular taxi was already bad, but overall, the taxi business model was not changed much if at all.
When the free money dried out, and it became obvious that uber will not be able to transition into self-driving taxi service, the quality of their service starts going to shit everywhere.
In my city, local taxies developed their own apps which are not much worse than uber, some continue to provide old style service, and uber became the provider with the lowest quality.
In my opinion, Uber business model is based on the fact that “gig workers” cannot calculate the proper amortization cost of the vehicle, so when the time goes by, companies who do know how to calculate the proper costs provide better service.
Obviously it depends on the quality of service where you live.
Text and chat (and the voice forms) are alive and well for communication.
Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
That's not communication being lost, it's media.
What is lost is social networking. Texting or calling people you already know isn't networking.
Every social network experiences convergent evolutionary pressure driving it to become social media instead.
Group chats are social networking. You’ll meet people you didn’t already know.
Maybe we have different concepts of what a group chat is. To me, group chats have my friends, and we will never invite anybody who is not already a friend of everybody. They are supposed to be high-trust environments.
Somewhat different. Most of the group chats I’m in are related to house parties where the host knows everyone but I don’t. Or they are interest / hobby related.
Once they hit a certain size or topiclessness they become social media again
well-run Discord servers can be outstanding in the same way as any well-run community
> Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.
Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.
Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.
But especially if you allow audio/video then your moderation costs can get very high if you're aiming for more "broadcast" and less "community."
> Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.
Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill.
There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.
It helps a lot for a community to have a specific focus.
For instance if it is photography technique or sports talk or Arduino programming almost all problematic content is "off-topic" and easy to delete without splitting hairs or offending libertarian sentiments.
Similarly "no explicit images" is an easy line to defend, but anything past that like "no CSAM" is excruciatingly difficult.
For a general purpose platform where people can post what they want, particularly if there is a libertarian ethos where people cry about "censorship", moderation is a bitch.
My personal pet peeve is that on any platform that has DMs I get a lot of messages, particularly when starting a new account, for things that are transparently scams and if I was starting one today my feeling of responsibility leads me to the conclusion that I would not support DMs.
Everything is being lost. We're in the process of sacrificing our collective humanity for corporate profit.
Resonates for me. I consume a bunch of content daily, but it's RSS mostly. Gemini, too. None of it is Facebook et al. I am in groups with friends and family on Signal and on Discord, and in email.
It feels more boring, for sure, but it is vastly more satisfyingly "human", if I can describe it that way.
Yes, I'm over 50.
Strong agree. I switched back to RSS after trying social media. Much more boring. And that has been a very good thing. It's also been much more substantive. It's like eating your veggies vs eating sugar candy.
Why should we believe that "being entertained" is a valuable thing? I suppose it serves an evolutionary purpose as "steering focus", e.g. noticing the unusual/novel/scary/etc. But, it's not the end goal. And overloaded attention mechanisms sounds like an obvious misfeature.
What Gemini are you and the author referring to? I presume not the LLM Gemini by Google?
Ah the Gemini protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
The protocol is older than productized transformers. It's like that scene from Office Space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZKVKxZcAo
My head was preparing to spin if he had said he gets all of his news from google Gemini.
It's a depressing thought, but I bet we will see younger people in our lifetime that just get news exclusively from LLMs
I'm going to have to be more explicit with "Gemini (the protocol)". :) Fing Google... :)
>Communication networks are not profitable.
Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.
Ma Bell was never profitable without government cheese. And her offspring can’t do much but complain about how every one else is making huge margins over “their” infrastructure.
Telecom is very very broken.
> Communication networks are not profitable.
This is strong and non-obvious claim; it warrants explanation, evidence, debate.
I wonder if the author is aware of Neil Postman's work, especially "Amusing ourselves to death". It seems very relevant to this article.
My thoughts definitely drifted there. I read it last year and IMO it’s still as relevant as ever.
We lost communication to advertising.
It's kinda weird.
Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.
On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.
I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
>> On the other hand that's not enough for a business
It could be. Once Facebook had everyone on board they could have pivoted to a model where people pay directly. It's easy to forget how incredibly useful it was in the early years. It's not enough for a business that needs to endlessly grow but businesses don't NEED to do that - especially tech companies where costs can be incredibly low once the initial website is built.
20 years ago I'd say that "free-to-play" would have been necessary because of the N² value that social sites create, just getting the idea mainstream was difficult enough and you can very much see the phases we went through, how Facebook inspired Twitter and back, etc. Like, of my family and friends who are on Facebook I think very few of them would become subscribers.
Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are
- from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else
- incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value
In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough.
(e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)
We lost civilization to advertising IMO. It feels like the majority of all technology is built around monetizing clicks. Astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix.
Hear hear. Ban all advertising. We could do it slow.
Start by banning all gambling and drug commercials. That's like 20% of all commercials right there. This is already normal in other countries.
Then ban all billboards. People hate them already.
Then the big one, ban targeted advertising. With personalized ads gone, all of the incentives that make data collection profitable are gone.
Of course there will still be bad actors that want data mining to continue. But right now you can't even read 95% of websites because they have popups that make you agree to data mining just to get in. I'll be searching for like, a recipe and they want my name, device IP, browser fingerprint, and anything else they can pinch.
I'm searching for a nice spinach salad recipe. I go to google
First it fires up an LLM, which will run a GPU in an AI data center that they probably cleared a forest to build.
I just made nvdia stronger. I just helped pump their AI "adoption" numbers. And I helped train an AI that will help layoff me and my friends.
As always I run the search again with "-noai" at the end. Now I'm searching twice for no reason. The results were better, and faster 10 years ago.
It gives me results and I click the first link. A video that I can't pause starts auto playing. This recipe isn't that good so I go back and find another. I need to click the back button 4 times.
I try another link. And get another pop up. I opt into data mining this time because uBo is having trouble with the full page transparent overlays. Now they have my data to sell to 3rd party intermediaries that will sell them to companies like palantir and cambridge analytica. Every search builds a little more of my "shadow profile".
Maybe I should have just gone to the library and taken a picture. All I wanted was a salad recipe and I've now helped train the system that made brexit possible. I've helped nvdia. I've helped the very AI datacenters that I hate. I've helped the data miners.
The experience of using a computer in 2025 is exhausting. Particularly search engines. They used to work so good. They used to be so fast.
You probably recall when Google first came out, using that over Yahoo browse by category was a sea change in terms of finding things. That was the peak. People were still hesitant to put their credit card info so the majority of the internet was just labors of love. It was like a library. Now it is like a casino.
It was. And yet... Sometimes I wish I still had a curated list of links by category to browse. Does anybody know of anybody who maintains something like that these days?
We need a Caesar who will ban all advertising. Lacking a Caesar, we could start with publicly funded NFL stadiums e.g. MetLife to get a foot in the door and go from there. Something must be done.
Soooo, when my email client is text-only and doesn't show me the attachments from the multi-part, it's "actively destroying the Fediverse" ? Ploum doesn't make any sense here. A "platform" such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube etc. (Do not mistake with "client", there's multiple Peertube "clients" or "frontends" for instance) using ActivityPub shouldn't have to implement and provide the user with the whole spec, otherwise just make the "ActivityPub" platform, implement everything there why even bother making other platforms?
The email client might not show attachments, but will still let you know there is a message. Pixelfed is not letting the user know there is even a message.
Also you seem to be responding to the original post or just the first paragraph of this post. He understands the differences and the way he sees the differences is the whole post.
William James wrote that one of characteristics of a religious state of mind is its seriousness. I'll quote:
For common men “religion,” whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, “All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.”
I myself can compare this with the cultural state of Soviet Union. It was a very atheistic country on the surface; yet the art, the cultural scene, the newspapers, the cinema; the school education; the public forums (they existed in the form of letters to newspapers); everything was imbued with that idea that there are serious things, not everything is vanity. It wasn't dull or dark; it was very reviving, in fact, because it gave you the foundation, something firm to stand upon. There were fantastically funny comedies (I wish I could find modern comedies like that) but there was also seriousness. I still remember some journal pieces of that time that, I admit, formed me as a person. An essay about a relatively minor crime, for example: two women were bitten by guard dogs. Yet somehow it rose to your place in life; your approach to what life is; you and your responsibility for how you live. And these themes were everywhere. Until 1991.
Alan Watts says something similar about how religions often harden into institutions that demand loyalty and "purity".
When that happens, they slide into in-group/out-group thinking, defensiveness, and "spiritual one-upmanship" which makes everything more tense and brittle.
> Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore.
I get what is being said, but i disagree with the framing. The "brainwashing" happened in two stages, and the first stage is perfectly logical.
Most people don't want just 1 identity, and they want separate spaces for being different.
If you're already OK with having two accounts on BBS, what is 1 or 2 accounts more for thefacebook.com?
Facebook sometimes decides to block your account when the name is not 100% identical to your official ID.
Google when you make a chargeback or your youtube channel has the song of a bird
The other platform also have similar weird cases.
I don't want to be instabanned from ALL the internet just because one site decides I did something wrong for real or imaginary reasons.
Where the framing still resonates for me is in who controls the boundaries
It took me a long time to notice that the word in the title is “massage”, and not “message”, in Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage (An inventory of effects): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
Links to various editions: https://www.biblio.com/the-medium-is-the-massage-by-marshall...
Also of interest, notes about the observer being the observed in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things — https://www.biblio.com/9780060916091 — and The First and Last Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom
I think the desire to not centralize identity has more to do with it than anything. We present different facets to different communities. The pseudo-indelible nature of internet commentary means saying something to anyone potentially means saying it to everyone, in any context.
That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back.
At some point I realized those people were just like that.
I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.
We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
Docker for humans!
Right, like the pods in the Matrix! Cool.
I think I somewhat agree with the author but I find the idea of a single account completely unappealing. My view on the benefits of federation is that you don't have a single entity gating your access. Having multiple accounts is a benefit.
No we didnt lose communication to entertainment. You still have communication protocols like email and xmpp. Fediverse is a communication protocol and some of that communication is entertainment. We need to seperate social media and fediverse because the philosophy is completely different. Fediverse has you make an account and you get posts from users you follow. The reason you need multiple accounts is because the sites are not complete enough to handle all of the different styles of posts. There is still a social and communication aspect to it.
Big tech social media is pushing you a stream of entertainment and pushing away from social interactions.
> I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology
Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?
Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.
Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?
Because my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to, not a nagging number that sits there being more than zero.
And when I do pay attention to it, I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through the 180 emails that I've been cc'd on. It's literally not worth my time or dilution of my attention. When I have attempted to get on top of this by doing all the curation and rule-authoring that productivity mavens shout about, it works for a little while but entropy sets in.
I'm just not into scripting my own life and maximizing my productivity, and my job does not pivot on prompt email responses. So my email is a garbage dump with tire fires in it, and I know that, and I get on with the things I know are actually important.
I'm not recommending this! It's just the compromise that I have settled in to. But if you wonder "why would anyone," this is it.
Thanks. So no fear of losing important stuff to the noise?
Also mind you, this is not about productivity. If you don't want to act on something, you delete it.
It's very presence in the list is already a drain on my attention that I didn't ask for and do not want. The fact that it requires any action on my part to remove it from the queue is an issue in and of itself.
For mojuba and myself, email is a way to organize TODO items. Things to take care of exist either way, and email is an awesome way to keep track of, and process, events / tasks asynchronously.
shermantanktop and you, forbiddenvoid, seem to refuse organizing TODOs, or perhaps even the concept that external events be allowed to generate TODOs for you ("my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to"). I closely know this -- i.e., "garbage dump with tire fires in it" -- because that's precisely what my SO's mailbox looks like. Whereas I've maintained a perfect inbox 0 for several decades, both at work and privately.
This is an unbridgeable psychological divide between two attitudes toward, or even two definitions of, tasks and obligations. People who can naturally implement inbox 0 never lose track of a task (not just in email, but in any other medium either), and get indignated when they receive reminders. They're excellent schedulers, and orderly, but also frequently obsessive-compulsive, neurotic. People who can't instinctively do inbox 0 cannot be taught or forced to do it, they tend to need repeated reminders, and may still forget tasks. At the same time, they have different virtues; they tend to shine with ill-defined problems and unexpected events.
Neither group is at fault; the difference has biological roots, in the nervous system. Our brains physically differ.
I kind of agree, but I explain it differently. Everyone’s job is a mix of reactive and proactive work. For my particular job, reactive work is necessary but will expand to fill all my time and then some. Proactive work is ambiguous and uncertain, but usually ends up being the highest value work that I do.
If I spend all my time on other people’s demands, it will all be urgent, but not enough of it will be important.
That's a super interesting situation (and description).
I always order reviewing the work of others ahead of working on my own code. This works wonders for the team. But admittedly, if the review workload is not distributed well, then my approach produces an annoying imbalance for me, and over the longer term, it leads to burnout.
Put differently, if I enable / assist / mentor others, that produces value comparable to my own personal output, for the company (or that's at least how I understand things). However, the emotional value of each, to me, is comparable only up to a certain extent -- namely, as long as I get to write enough code myself. The proportion must be right.
I rely on management / the team to (self-)organize the review workload, and then I prefer to help others first, and work on my own stuff second. I draw much more satisfaction from working on my own code, but I feel the importance of supporting others, so I prioritize the latter. This particular prioritization too rewards me emotionally, but only up to a certain point. I can say "no", but, in my view, if I have to say "no" frequently, to requests for assistance, then the workload is ill-distributed, and that responsibility is not mine. (I explicitly don't want to be promoted to a level where I become responsible for assigning tasks to people.)
I’m in a senior position and just coming off a year where I intentionally focused on enabling others and making the collective group more effective. That meant more reactive (and less visible) work.
I got feedback that my contributions weren’t tangible and visible enough. I switched gears back to my previous mode (more proactive work) and all is well again.
Different work cultures treat this differently. At another company my enabling activities would have been valued more. But I do think being the glue in a group is usually undervalued.
Thanks, that's a great explanation!
Not really. I check a couple of times a day, look for stuff from people who are likely important, delete noisy stuff once a week, and the rest lingers.
The threaded nature of email both helps and hurts. If it’s from a chatty sender with a chatty reply all conversation, I can delete it all, except if my boss replies, I should probably look at that.
I should also say that I work at a large company where people are auto-included with varying levels of intention. If I never sent an email, I would still get hundreds per day. Coworkers do zero inbox, so it can be done. I just don’t try anymore. Slack is where the actually urgent stuff is anymore.
> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
But what about the joy of deleting 112 messages from the trash folder every day?
I'm with you. I've had a mostly empty email for at least a decade (< 10 items, with each of them representing an action I'll need to take) and can't imagine doing it differently. I'm one of those empty desk/empty mind people, I guess.
In a just world you would do 16 hours of manual rock breaking and tilling in a gulag for a decade then you can come back and tell is how essential email is to your life, sorry "digital life" whatever the FUCK that is.
You have only one inbox?
Reading through this thread, I can't help but think that Stanley Elkin got everything right when he wrote George Mills. The blurbs and reviews of George Mills often reduce it to being about the failures of the 99%, but I think it is more about why the 1% succeeds and the answer is fairly simple, because the 99% wants the 1% to succeed, it absolves them of all culpability. This is modern (contemporary) life, absolution. George Mills seems to only increase in relevance as far as I can see, but it only recedes in relevance in the eyes of the public because it offers no scapegoats.
This time it is different, right? The first George Mills was correct in believing that, but we don't live in his times.
The author’s ideological bent against Big Tech shows through most clearly in the passage on Uber:
> Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights
There are valid complaints about Uber, but most people consider it a materially better service than taxis most of the time. They vote that way with their wallets, long after VC subsidies ended, and often even when it costs _more_ than a taxi.
Social Media fills the same role that Alcohol used to. As far as debilitating addictions go, it does seem to be a small improvement though. Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example.
> Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example.
Many people drive-during which appears to have a similarly dangerous outcome.
That comparison feels uncomfortably accurate
I know it seems reductive, but in the early 90s there was a serious discussion about NAT. NAT bifurcates the internet into producers and consumers. naturally everyone looking to monetize the internet thought this was just fine, even desirable. and almost all the people who actually built the internet were aghast. ubiquitous reachability was the goal, not making a new form a television.
the details wrt social media etc were unknown, but the path we were taking was quite clear.
Communication was mostly lost before the rise of social media—assuming we ever had anything more than isolated pockets of actual communication, which I am not convinced we have. Literature has been exploring this for a good many decades, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good example and even shows how our relation to it has changed in the 80 odd years since its release; these days when it comes up the interpretation/discussion about it is more often than not, about social causes, which is depressingly ironic, it is using the novel in the same way the characters of the novel use Singer.
The book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman seems really relevant here. The thesis is that different modes of information are best suited to different tasks. Postman argues that television is best suited for entertainment. So the programs that do well on TV will naturally tend to be entertainment.
That book was written in 1985, but the core observations are also applicable to modern cellphones (which have become, for the majority of users, entertainment devices).
Postman then talks about how our communication systems have degraded as a result of entertainment being the strength of our current modes.
Fantastic read.
Ploum is one of the people getting me into blogging 12 or so years ago. I'm so glad to see it popup again here, it's like a big piece of nostalgia. And the piece is current. Thanks Ploum!
I don't get the hangup on having multiple accounts. The point of AP is that you can read any kind post, not create any kind of post.
There is a truth to consumption over communication, but that is in the destruction of third spaces and the increasing difficulty in making friends. The fediverse is a force against that in my view, even if it has some of the creature comforts of regular social media.
"All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected."
This isn't true. You can still meet in person or make a phone call.
As for news media... They tend to be at the beck and call of whoever owns them. Most of them use the same press agencies but promote political binaries to the exclusion of other viewpoints.
Sure but wasn't this always the case? People told stories. joked, bantered, preached, and flirted both to communicate on different levels and to entertain themselves and each other.
And so my Signal is solid 40% memes. Memes that someone carefully selected and sent me but still pure entertainment. No evil monopoly necessary to make it so.
IMHO communication is entertainment sometimes. Most of the “communication” we do day to day, like small talks to colleagues, or tweeting some posts, in my opinion, is just a way to relax and have fun, like patting each other electronically.
Sure, but there's nothing worse than when you want to have a serious conversation with someone, and all they can make are jokes.
There are a lot of serious conversations we need to have as a society right now. And collectively, all we can do is make jokes.
Throughout history, real social conversations and movements have happened around thought leaders that dedicate their lives to painstakingly understanding and expressing a certain point of view on a set of issues. Be it in written form or through oratory, it then acts as an anchor to frame and facilitate conversations between people one-on-one.
Real progress requires that hard work of crafting and spreading a vision, something to point at that helps people express what they struggle to express themselves. It also then needs that protected intimacy of long conversations between individuals to digest it.
The architecture of social media centered around short-form public communication is not appropriate for this.
This of course applies to both constructive and destructive movements, but it’s the only way to get big real things done. I suppose that’s why we have this emergent class of powerful independent (podcast) intellectuals after a long time of the concept not being a thing. Again, for better or worse, plenty of both.
If serious conversation isn't possible on social media, then what do you call this?
Is the conversation we're having now not both serious and on social media?
I think if the great minds of old had access to our modern internet, they would have no trouble communicating their ideas. It's not like all social media is short form. You can type a whole book into the comment box here if you want.
Social media is probably not the best place to make such communications anyway. It is good for propaganda but not good for serious discussion. Serious, scientific discussion asks for a lot more than just communication itself.
>A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post
and
>When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago,
I am confused.
Bloggers don't always publish immediately after writing a post, the start of the prior post explains the time line and the delay: https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
hmm ok, I thought it might be that, but then I would have expected "I did" to have been "I published"
> Communication networks are not profitable.
Lost me on that one. Communication networks provide significant value and can be quite profitable. That's a whole industry.
> But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social!
Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up.
I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.
Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front.
For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)
But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).
What resonated for me is the framing shift: not "centralized vs decentralized," but communication vs consumption
Economics. Entertainment and monetizing eyeballs is much more lucrative than charging for communication services.
> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly."
This has been my biggest beef with Facebook. I have an FB account, but never use it, anymore. By walking away from it, there are a number of folks with whom I can no longer communicate.
In some cases, that’s fine, but in a couple, I sincerely miss them.
I like the idea behind the fediverse, but find it too “fiddly” to use. That’s often an issue with things designed by engineers, for engineers.
There’s long been discussion of “One ID to Rule Them All,” but that brings in the inevitable (and completely valid) point of who arbitrates/controls the infrastructure for that ID (“and in the Darkness, Binds Them”).
The thing is, folks really want convenience. If it’s not provided as a benevolent resource, an opening is made available to less benevolent people. It’s going to happen, and all the hand-wringing in the world can’t stop human nature.
I feel that public discourse is particularly vulnerable to the medium. Who controls the medium, controls the discourse, and, as we’ve already seen, that can have serious consequences in the real world.
Not a new conundrum. Social Media has simply sprinkled Miracle Gro onto the problem.
I’m not sure there’s any real solution. I am thinking that today’s newer generation (“Alpha”?) is developing a “thick skin,” and maybe, is becoming resistant to people that manipulate communication. I’m fairly despondent about my generation. We seem to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the shysters.
I had such high hopes for blue sky. The team seems highly un-problematic. Every time I go on there it's just happy stories and people communicating.
But still almost nobody uses it. And now worst of all, people are saying it doesn't "count" as real federation.
It seems like we're letting perfect be the enemy of good. But what do I know
Bluesky seems to be pre-Musk Twitter 2.0. Its content is basically the same (art + "look at the bad thing the Republicans are doing - the Democrats will solve this"). Its moderation policies are basically the same (post anything too different from what's there = ban. Centralised moderation). Its user base, although smaller, draws from roughly the same pool. And Jack Dorsey made it. And it even has a blue logo. It's clear he just wanted to create Twitter a second time and succeeded at that.
Facebook started as people communicating too.
I just don't understand why do you need to create a new incompatible protocol when ActivityPub exists - unless enshittification is in the roadmap. Even less I understand why prefer it over e.g. Mastodon from the user's perspective
This article makes me think of how defiant Discord has been against all of this, and how slowly I'm starting to succumb to many of the same forces, although much slowly than other platforms. It's a minor miracle they never got bought up/sold themselves.
Also reminds me of the Dark Forrest Yancy Strickler stuff.
This only makes sense if you only read the headline.
Social media is yet another strange game where the only winning move is not to play.
We must stop calling them social media and call them what they have become: media. The percentage of actually social stuff is negligible. Now you can classify having a conversation with a random stranger that you never going to meet in your life over twitter as "being social". I'd say you are just passing time or entertaining yourself. Or worse, compensating lack of real world social interactions.
I found this a bit odd as I don't recall ever thinking of social media as about "sending messages", and only loosely would I say they're for "communication". They're mostly for one-way communication, which is essentially what entertainment is too, so it's not surprising that social media would feel like entertainment. When you make a post on Facebook you're not really "sending a message" to anyone in particular, you're just broadcasting it out to the network.
But this got me thinking about what I think a "message" really is. Maybe there's a Dunbar's number kind of thing here because I feel like there's some sort of limit on how many people I can send textual content to before it stops being a "message" and becomes more like an "announcement". Like I get emails, and some of those are messages because they come from individuals and are sent to me and perhaps a small set of other individuals. But some emails are more like announcements (or even "content"), and such quasi-messages have existed since before email went mainsteam (like holiday newsletters that people sent out with xmas cards).
It's true that many social media platforms have a messaging system that exists in parallel ("direct messages"), but that always seemed kind of separate from the core essence of the platform.
The closest you get to real "messages" in social networks is comments, but in my experience the degree to which those constitute "messages" or "communication" varies a lot from platform to platform and also from user to user. These days a large proportion of comments are just slightly more specific "reactions" like "That's so great!" or "Wow" or "Thanks for posting this". I don't often see genuine discussion happening in comments (although HN, if you consider it a social media site, is an exception to this).
There has been an evolution in this regard, but even back in the day I think it wasn't what I'd call "messaging". The earliest platform I can remember using that (in retrospect) I could call a social network was LiveJournal. But LJ was a blogging platform. You didn't post "messages" to other people, you posted, well, posts, and maybe people would comment on them or maybe they wouldn't. I would never have said that I dreamed of LJ becoming "email 2.0". And I'd say modern microblogging-type platforms (like Twitter) seem even more removed from email or "messaging".
I also don't see decentralization as really connected to this. To me the main advantage of decentralization is to eliminate single points of failure and guard against various sorts of rugpulls (like what eventually happened to LJ). But whether a platform fosters communication, messages, interaction, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much independent of whether it's decentralized.
This isn't to say that I disagree that something's been lost in internet communication over the years. But to me that missing thing seems mostly to be a combination of attention and authenticity.
We've lost attention in the sense that now that people do everything with their phones, they consume and create content more diffusely, as opposed to having a division between "I'm sitting at my computer reading or writing" and "I'm doing something else". The small screens and balky input mechanisms of phones make this problem even worse for writing than it is for reading.
And we've lost authenticity in the sense that so many platforms have become contaminated with stuff that is in no sense communication from any human, not even one-way communication. Instead it's junk generated by corporations to sell products (perhaps with some intermediate steps of harvesting data, etc.). This has become much, much worse in the last few years with the rise of AI slop. It's harder and harder to find stuff on the web that actually represents the work of a human being expressing themselves in a personal way.
So yeah, we've lost something, but I wouldn't say we lost communication to entertainment. It's more like we lost the boundaries of the units of our communication so that we find ourselves in a constant blur of content, rather than a sequence of discrete units each of which we process and ponder independently.
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This is one of those articles that is too obsessed with amusing itself with its own pretentiousness to communicate anything interesting - which is ironic given the author seems thinks they prefer communications to entertainment.