Neat! I have wondered how much of a foothold "retrograde" tech will take in the next 10-20 years.
Decision fatigue, nostalgia, attenuation — call it what you will. At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
A very modern malaise. Excuse the armchair philosophizing.
> At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
I don't think there's enough useful and organized information to evaluate. There's no reason for everyone to be stuck in a vast ocean of content labeled with a handful of vague categories, except that that's just the way that someone decided to make it.
If I want to figure out if I want to try a game, I can go to steam and watch a trailer, look at the tags, and still have no idea if the game is worth playing. How do I make a decision?
If I just watch 3 minutes of a lets play, or a live stream, I can get an idea of what the game is like. This youtube channels thing is giving us exactly that experience.
Opening a youtube video directly, on the other hand, is an entire ordeal. It's slow to load, takes up a bunch of ram, puts the video in your history and messes up the minigame of trying to micromanage the algorithm so you don't end up with bad recommendations. It's hard to just simply watch a few seconds of a bunch of videos to get a vibe.
There's so much low hanging fruit in terms of content organization/discovery, it drives me insane that the experience is generally so bad, and getting worse.
Clay Shirky gave a talk on this years ago (also I think it's a blog post) called "It's not information overload, it's filter failure". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
There's certainly a market for it among the older crowd, but for those who've spent their formative years consuming content in the Netflix / Youtube era ... you can't miss what you've never had. I do echo the decision fatigue complaint - there is simply too much content out there to meaningfully engage with. The downsides of living in such a connected world ...
This is actually very untrue. It sound right but it's not. A lot of the younger crowd takes to analogue devices as bees to honey when they've had a chance to use it. Vinyl is a growth market. Tapes are being collected. Even film roll companies are experiencing year over year growth. Since their demise 10 years earlier. I think it's because all these things are not "nothing" you can destroy them, lose them, sell them, buy them, own them, give them away, hold them, they are unique and hard to copy.
This is actually making me think about how I watch programs when I dont really need to focus in on anything. I wonder if there is a plug-in where you can spin the wheel between types of media to watch and it selects one for you.
My 6yo has an iPhone which arrived OOTB with a News widget, accessible by a single swipe, including similar "breaking" content. No sign-in required. Just an internet connection. What does she want for Christmas? An iPhone 14 Pro Max. I kid you not.
Literally everyone she goes to school with has TikTok and are talking about content in that app day in and day out.
Do I like this? No. Are you a million miles from reality for pre-teens? Yes.
A song and dance about how this is a somehow simply a treatise on the decline of Microsoft is naive at best and highly disingenuous at worst. I really don't want to sound vitriolic but do y'all live in the real world? I wonder sometimes.
Convey a singular point with intent. Below is first paragraph rewritten. Just my 2¢.
---
Essays should be persuasive. But we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.
Useful writing makes a strong claim without resorting to falsehoods.
It is more useful to say that Pike's Peak is in the center of Colorado than somewhere within.
Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. Useful writing is bold and true. It tells people something important, that they might not have known, without resorting to manufactured surprise or equivocality. This is formative of fundamental insights.
Any idea will not be novel to all, but may still have impact for the many.
In argument: be correct, be important, be strong. This will ensure usefulness.
I think this deletes an important sentence. The comment about saying Pike's peak is in the centre of Colorado being inaccurate and that you can only say it's near the centre is showing an example of precision and correctness being opposites. You've lost the point of the example in your paragraph and the sentence suddenly seems like a completely random insertion.
It is more useful to say that Pike's Peak is in the center of Colorado than somewhere within.
This kind of thing is taking terseness too far, I think. If I’m not immediately familiar with Pike’s Peak it takes me a moment to unpack your meaning, but I immediately understood the more verbose explanation in the original.
Anecdotal: was setting up some Hisense TVs at work the other day and the unit came up with a message that "all Network features" would be disabled if you declined the EULA.
Immediately thought "works for me".
I wonder if any other manufacturer offers that choice.
Edit: commercial signage panels are about as close as you get to dumb TVs these days. Rarely include any smart features, can get in quite large sizes. Not OLED or anything but if you just want a decent display...
Dipping into whimsical analogies: this is a digital abattoir where the meat = content.
Now, as before, no-one wants to see how the sausage gets made. Especially those selling it.
Can't kill demand or bear the visceral truth. So instead we'll pretend the seedy underbelly doesn't exist. Paper over dissonance with ethical codes and platitudes.
Not new. Just a context shift in production of sustenance for the collective, insatiable gaping maw.
Yup; bear in mind that pretty much ALL major user-generated content websites have to deal with this - think Google (and I now wonder if G+, Picasa, etc were shut down because they couldn't handle the inappropriate content anymore?), Dropbox (who may do a passive one where they only investigate if reported by law enforcement), Youtube (also Google), Discord, Slack, etc. It's a problem everywhere.
I also believe this is one of the reasons where Facebook's real name policy comes in - it discourages people from posting the worst of it. Animal brutality could just be kids fooling around on their phone, accidental, but produced child pornography is not, and the people making that shit know really well how they shouldn't put it on sites that require them to use their real names.
Every web community has to deal with this, some types of communities are more prone to this than others. On HN this obviously works very well, also other 90s style web forums don't suffer these problems but that's probably also because those usually have a very close scope and attract only certain kind of people.
Facebook is really broad, so are also online news magazines which are sometimes full of horrible comments (only text of course). Usenet more or less ceased to exist because of that. So in reality this is not a Facebook problem but an online community problem - it just looks like a FB problem because that's the major online community.
I wonder if this could be solved with a 3rd party Facebook integration/startup :-). Anyway, Facebook also has more problems with that, another one being undesired unsolicited contacts which fall into the same category of not so nice stuff about Facebook. People don't see the meat production but the bad smell is really close which is why many leave.
Ironic that participants were initially contacted via FB ads.
In light of the recent "Research" app disclosure, and that in both cases a fee was paid for participation, it makes me wonder what people won't do for a few extra dollars in their bank account given a similar scenario.
The NYT article is almost apologetic about its inconclusiveness. I might wonder - should I happen to be wearing my tinfoil hat - that it is designed as a means of placation, an ode to the status quo, rather than a deterrent for the average consumer.
Why are we surprised by this progression? All "good" things go bad. The same lessons, rinsed and repeated. Power, money corrupts. We burn effigies and mark their passing. We move on.
Tempted to say a little more history and psychology instead of fiscal fixation would make a difference. Tempted, but no. It's not how humans work.
>Tempted to say a little more history and psychology instead of fiscal fixation would make a difference. Tempted, but no. It's not how humans work. //
I don't think profit motive is innate, we're not Ferengi!
However, things can't go on growing forever, and the rich need growth to get richer, and need churn to maintain fashion as the societal norm that feeds growth, and feeds purchases of stuff in order to fit in ...
Things that work well enough and stably and are liked are prime for exploitation for [more] profit. It's really only very few people driving that exploitation -- though perhaps many more would if given the chance.
not profit, but simple rational local optimization. if you were not selfish enough, you would be dead. (or your ancestors would have died before proceating.)
Do they "go" bad or are they surpassed/replaced by better things? I'd argue Tumblr is inherently a better product than AOL or BBS. With FB, while it certainly slid over time, it also acquired the next/better platforms to protect itself against their disruption, and so it may actually be somewhat protected or given longer shelf life.
Honest feedback: I don't see how this succeeds without integration with existing applicant workflows. The cognitive overhead of another app to store data, manually update status etc is high.
If e.g. Monster or Indeed launched this as a value-add to existing functionality it would be big, but i'm not going to make the effort you're asking for in isolation.
Decision fatigue, nostalgia, attenuation — call it what you will. At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
A very modern malaise. Excuse the armchair philosophizing.