Comment by corimaith

Comment by corimaith 4 days ago

12 replies

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I think it's fair to say after a decade or so social media does not "connect people to other people", what you are describing are parasocial relationships. People are lonelier than ever, not just in America but worldwide.

Besides, for any hobby, recommendations are only really relevant for newcomers without solidified preferences and knowledge, after that the space of available content quickly dwindles as one seeks increasingly ambitious and avant-garde works to their preferences. Amateur stuff can be quite generic after all, what not with the lack of resources and experience. If you're still relying on an algorithm, I'd see it more as a vapid surface-level engagement with a hobby/medium than a genuine interest to dive further.

Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.

snoman 3 days ago

> Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.

You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place, another medium, a different author, actor, photographer, director, philosopher, painter. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you, and that reel you saw that just rehashed something well-known to you, was new info to someone else, somewhere. I can assure you, in 2010, there were plenty oh people bitching about bloggers retelling the same old things they learned decades prior.

“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.

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  • mullingitover 3 days ago

    Everything invented up to your 20s is just the innate environment.

    Everything invented from your 20s-40s is cool, you accept it and will probably make a living with it.

    Everything invented after your 40s is a perversion of the natural order and must be destroyed.

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    • mlyle 3 days ago

      On the other hand, kids don't seem to have great mental health, attention spans, or academic attainment right now, and this type of social media is one of the likely factors behind this change.

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      • mullingitover 2 days ago

        I almost forgot the accompaniment to the third item:

        When you reach your 40s, something starts corrupting the youth.

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        • mlyle 2 days ago

          Hm. I didn't know me getting older could affect so much time series data. I must be really powerful ;)

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      • southernplaces7 3 days ago

        would you like to serve up some comparative evidence showing just how much these things have degraded in kids these days vs. some particular point in the past?

        This reminds me of people harping about the pervasiveness of misinformation in social media today, while completely forgetting how narrowly propagandized and baited toward yellow journalism the much more restricted media sources of the past often were, helping create all kinds of absurdly ignorant belief systems from which escape into alternative viewpoints was much harder.

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        • mlyle 3 days ago

          Here is a blog that rolls up lots and lots of time series graphs from different research.

          https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...

          Time series data is always confounded in many ways; lots of stuff changes, and as a society we change what we're paying attention to and that itself changes things like emergency room visits or perceptions of being anxious. At the same time, a whole lot of different measures moved in a negative direction suddenly (after slowly moving that way for many years). Of course, to be fair: these time series seem to show more the effect of social media in general and smartphones than short form video content on social media/smartphones.

          There is no shortage of comparative evidence, though.

          There's also evidence that short form video use is correlated with shorter attention span and that it is addictive. Of course, correlation ain't causation: maybe it's just the most naturally attention-challenged that consume a lot of it. I personally suspect it's a little of both.

          We also have research that shows that if you show people lots of short form video and then test their attention span later, it's worse. But this, of course, isn't the same as the effect of voluntarily watching short form video. This is all trivial to find, but if you want links to specific things, let me knwo.

          Kids complain that the other kids who are on tiktok all the time will do something like ask a peer a question, and then drift off to something else during the answer if it's longer than a single short sentence.

          I've been doing youth programs for quite awhile now, and there's been a definite qualitative shift in the past several years, and various kinds of quantitative shifts in my own data aligned with this trend, too.

          There will never be perfect evidence, unfortunately. We have to act on the information we have, and when we're studying humans it's going to include time series data and artificial studies of the phenomenon in lab conditions.

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      • lmm 3 days ago

        One person's short attention span is another person's intolerance for bullshit. One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world. The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.

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  • corimaith 3 days ago

    >“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.

    You know it's interesting to frame these arguments because it's exemplar of the clash of worldviews here, between the classic view of an cyclical history, and the modern linear view of historical continuity. The latter was birthed in reaction against the former, yet as the inheritors of Rennaisance conquered the world, it eventually became the norm, the "old" of which the "present" would be compared against.

    So if the present now cycles the past, is this an abberation or the norm here? The past is the "future", and the present is "stagnation". It is both revolutionary and regressionary. The TikTok Bill, the need to retake the Narrative by the Establishment thus represents itself the Past reasserting Continuity, and thus the Future, while Present pushes back to the very denial of the Future itself, to establish it's totalizing dominance of an endless now. So for the question of whether I would like the future, well that depends on which of the two sides win.

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  • photonthug 3 days ago

    > You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place .. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you.. same old things decades prior..

    This reads as both extremely condescending and extremely naive at the same time.

    An earlier version of the internet had blogs and meme lords sure, and a generation consumed that stuff and found that it was good. And after that consumption, it turns out kids still wanted to grow up to be doctors, astronauts, or whatever.

    Another generation consumed another kind of content which was mostly leaning towards short-format, after many years spent researching/weaponizing dopamine and misinformation. Almost all of that content was mediated by corporations really, with as little involvement from people as the corporations could manage. That generation wanted to be influencers and "content creators" when they grew up.

    The basic incentive structures are radically different now, for companies, creators, and consumers, and we're sort of past doing things for the lulz. There's a difference here that actually makes a difference, and writing it off as "yawn, more of the same if only your perspective was as wide as mine!" seems more ignorant than enlightened.

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