1. Medium: Mechanical reel > Digital reel
2. Gameplay: Fixed odds > Adjustable odds > Programmatic adaptive odds
3. Experience: Pull the lever and win or lose > Pull the lever and win even if you lose (e.g. get back change) > Swipe a card and win even if you lose > Swipe a card and watch the game auto-play until you're out of money
After reading that book (in 2014), I made my last Facebook post (the history of the slot machine) and promptly downloaded my data and deleted my account. I'm paraphrasing but Crawford's point was basically that social media is a socio-emotional slot machine.
The phrase he used, "playing to extinction", very much reminds me of what's happening now across most entertainment categories, broadly speaking (autoplay, loot boxes, slot machine-style gaming content, etc.)
Why haven't we discovered life yet amongst the vastness of the stars?
Because they wanked themselves to death in VR pleasure palaces.
Also, one would hope that those that are so addicted that they are fine to just haul-off and piss themselves would be able to think ahead and simply wear a diaper.
Riiiigggghhhhttttt
To give an example, slot machines in Nevada must pay out a minimum of 75% of the take. Additionally, no programming/odds updates or machine resets may be made to the slot machine until the machine has sat idle for a minimum of 4 minutes; and if an update/reset is being made the machine _must_ clearly display that this is occurring.
So the sick thing here is that each loss does in fact bring you closer to the winning spin. One of the only real strategies of slot machines (in the sense that there can be a strategy to a game of luck) is to stand around idling watching other people lose, then after someone leaves a machine with a bad run you immediately drop in to the spot and start playing the same machine.
Machines plural - which means a machine that just paid out (in a casino with a large group of machines) can theoretically pay out again before a machine that has a string of losing spins.
win = rand() < .75The takeout is configurable. With older machines they have to be manually set at the machines, but with more modern machines it is controlled by a server. The period of time while the takeout remains unchanged is referred to as a cycle. Casinos are generally free to change the takeout so long as it is a minimum of the regulated amount. Then there are the regulations requiring idle time at the machines like I mentioned in my previous comment. Additionally, the casino may need to notify the gaming commission prior to making a takeout change depending on local regulations.
What I'm objecting to is your idea that machines are more likely to payout after they've lost for a while. Each spin is independent of previous spins. The 75% is just a statistical average over the long run.
To me that implies that the machine is keeping track of a period of time to make sure it pays out 75% during that period.
Each spin is random and independent of whether it's been on a losing streak or not.
My intent was not to imply that each individual losing pull increases the odds, but more that if you just keep rolling the same two dice long enough eventually it's going to come up snake eyes. And this leads to people (especially gambling addicts) continuing to pull that lever after they are long past what they can afford. They know if they just keep pulling the lever (or more likely pushing the bet max button these days) that eventually it has to pay. But the reality is the casinos are predators that feed on that behavior.
Most casinos actually have a much higher takeout rate than the legally required minimums as well; it's very common that they are set closer to the 90-97% range. It's generally observed that a higher takeout will result in more money for the house. With a higher takeout people are more likely to keep winning a bit and feel like they are getting lucky, so they will actually spend more money than if the aren't hitting at all.
Worse yet with progressives is they may even span multiple casinos. So that grand prize someone is grinding for and wasting their money on... it may never hit at that casino.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
Huh. That appears to be a mostly-accurate summary of Wikipedia's description of the episode, which heavily features the term "addicted". But it's an awful summary of the episode itself, which doesn't use the concept of addiction at all. (Also, the game doesn't autoplay; it is shown on screen requiring effort from the player.)
The game is a malevolent agent which intentionally makes very specific modifications to the players' minds. The relevant concept is infection, not addiction. The plot of the episode is essentially identical to that of the TNG episode Conspiracy[1], or the Buffy episode Bad Eggs[2].
And while not completely identical, the plot is also very similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers[3]. It's a very, very common theme. (As shown by the fact that TNG did it twice!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(Star_Trek:_The_Nex...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Eggs_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Sl...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers
- People neglect their responsibilities in order to indulge their addiction.
- People consume their resources (e.g., by selling their property) in order to indulge their addiction.
- People fail to achieve their goals because they are distracted by their addiction.
- People alienate their social contacts, either through neglect (see above) or through what is seen as excessive focus on their addiction.
None of these elements appear in the episode. No addiction-related themes appear in the episode.
Here are the plot elements that do occur in the episode:
- A foreign influence infiltrates the group and spreads uncontrollably. It is difficult to perceive directly.
- The foreign influence brainwashes and enslaves everyone who is exposed to it, substituting its own goals for theirs. Far from neglecting responsibilities, brainwashed victims will happily do extra work for no other purpose than to further the foreign goals.
- People who should be absolutely trustworthy, such as Captain Picard or Wesley's mother, are "replaced" by impostors who share their knowledge but whose goals are nefarious. (In this case, the person is not replaced in their entirety, but their mind is replaced with a new one.)
How would you describe that plot?
If you want a TNG episode themed around the perils of drug use, that would be The Naked Now, where the altered mental state of the crew threatens to destroy the ship. If you want one themed around addiction, that would be Hollow Pursuits, where Barclay's "holodiction" severely interferes with his performance of his duties.
I don't have the clip handy but at one point a character points out to Wesley something along the lines of "want to know the trick to this game? It plays itself!"
> ALYSSA: You know what the secret is, don't you? Don't force it. If you just let the game happen, it almost plays itself.
But at the beginning of the episode, you see Riker playing:
> ETANA: Concentrate. Make the disc go into the cone.
> RIKER: How do I do that?
> ETANA: Just let go. Relax. You'll do it.
> the first one misses, the second is a success
( http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/206.htm )
You could make the argument that everyone misses their first shot for no other reason than that it gives them a false feeling of accomplishment when they make the second one.
But it would make more sense to say that victory in the game comes from assuming a particular state of mind, presumably one that allows the game to do its thing.
You don't need to "let the game happen" for an autoplaying game to play itself.
You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.
She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.
In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.
It strikes you that true love does exist after all.”
- 8fhdkjw039hd
It has over 660 million users these days, the vast majority of whom are single men.
Something like 30% of the users tell it "I love you" on a daily basis.
Doesn't seem all that different from 99% of media consumption thats existed in my lifetime.
To wit, I think what's interesting about this Era of media relative to the TV Era is the vanishing proportion of the population that's able to escape the habit.
[1] Not a value judgment: my sister and her husband consume massive amounts of TV but they're also both early-career doctors. I would be braindead at the end of the day too.
The key things are:
1) time offline is on your side. you can saturate yourself with current trends that interest you pretty quickly. You need to allow actual real world time to pass for those trends to update.
2) scroll with purpose and intent. aggressively dismiss things that don't immediately get your attention from any unknown source. (Helps the algorithm actually cater to your interests)
3) tell the algorithm when you don't like something. There's usually a "don't show me content like this" option somewhere. I felt dramatic about it at first, but it's the only tool you have to keep the algorithm from incorrectly assuming you enjoyed the content when you did watch the entire thing (out of sheer curiosity / hope / general inaction).
I noticed I now get a lot of low profile things in my feed that are actually pretty cool and fit the medium nicely. Lots of trade work stuff, before / afters, machines doing stuff, stand up comedy bits, etc. Those personalized things do not have room to flourish if I am giving too many things a chance.
That's the next influencer game imo. Having people want to see your feed(s)
so maybe AI === brain dead corporate owners?
In the old model people left the tv droning in the background, in the new model, people are riveted by their phones (with 2nd and 3rd screens (and radio (and billboards)) droning in the background).
All these ppl scaring us with AGI are either distracting us from the clear and present dangers of slow AI so they can keep profiting from it , or are just duped by silly technooptimism.
I think these are two sides of the same coin.
I digress, the scalability point is fair and this is an irrelevant sidebar
This presumes the existence of important "other activities", and relegates this content consumption as some lower-priority thing done between these activities. I know people who really don't have any important other activities: passively scrolling through video after video is their primary activity. For this [I'd guess growing] group, VR's ability to block out the unimportant real-world is the next obvious step.
3d video served by an AR sunglass display is plausible (but probably way overkill for the next decade), but feeling like you're in an entirely different environment while waiting in line at the post office is never going to be a thing people want.
The same was said of video vs. reading. “I’m never going to want a video experience, it doesn’t fit in between other activities as well as reading a page of something.”
There is a middle ground between "AR will never take off as an entertainment medium" and "AR will kill video/images/text."
I see a future where you blink twice to power up your ocular nerve implants for a few minutes of stim, then power 'em down when you get a popup that your buddy is nearby and ordering drinks.
Google Glass's spectacular failure had a chilling effect on the entire industry, but it failed due to (1) lack of killer apps, (2) poor aesthetics, and (3) consumer concern about privacy.
But ML has revolutionized image and video processing, Apple etc. could design a less hideous headset, and nobody cares about privacy anymore.
I think it would help to not make most of the promotional material about video recording, and not make a huge camera the most visible feature. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Quest lineup, including rumored Cambria and Apple renders, obscure the forward looking cameras.
Google Glass picture, which looks like a webcam on your face: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/19/google-gl...
The Snapchat glasses, as well as the Instagram/RayBan glasses don't seem to have suffered from having a prominent camera, which suggests there was a change in mass acceptance of cameras.
I fully expect BeReal's model to change in less than two years from now (probably within a year). I see it quickly devolving into tedium after a while. Users will disable notifications to post, become passive consumers. "Influencers" drive adoption of platforms and it's hard to be the same type of influencer unless you're constantly living that lifestyle, which almost no influencer today actually does.
I think there's definitely a product in there for people who want a tool to help manage their attention, one they can intentionally shape.
But that product cannot be primarily ad-supported, since the fundamental purpose of ad-supported tech is to command (and sell) attention. Users would need to be customers, not the product, which means they would need to be willing to pay. And since attention is power, anyone producing this would either have to be past motivation for more power, or principled about not abusing the potential in abusing an attention management tool.
I'm sure the userbase and builders who can make this happen exist, but they are smaller. The incentives against it are powerful currents. Most of us will choose the opaque cost of selling our attention and behavioral trail over the transparent cost of our currency. Most of us are not past motivation for more power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
they were calling this out since 1984 - hard to distinguish between luddism and genuine problems
Literacy requires effort, and protected time to acquire analytical skills that are not natural to humans. Childhood was, then, embraced, because it's the way to get literacy.
All-encompassing technologies that require no effort, e.g. TV or, as it appears to be the case, AR, might end the need for childhood, hence the book title. Among the novel technologies, the computer would be the one to "save" childhood, but only if society requires active (as opposed to passive) competency with computer technology. Quoting Postman:
"The only technology that has this capacity is the computer. In order to program a computer, one must, in essence, learn a language. This means that one must have control over complex analytical skills similar to those required of a fully literate person, and for which special training is required. Should it be deemed necessary that everyone must know how computers work, how they impose their special world-view, how they alter our definition of judgment—that is, should it be deemed necessary that there be universal computer literacy—it is conceivable that the schooling of the young will increase in importance and a youth culture different from adult culture might be sustained. But such a development would depend on many different factors. The potential effects of a medium can be rendered impotent by the uses to which the medium is put. For example, radio, by its nature, has the potential to amplify and celebrate the power and poetry of human speech, and there are parts of the world in which radio is used to do this. In America, partly as a result of competition with television, radio has become merely an adjunct of the music industry. And, as a consequence, sustained, articulate, and mature speech is almost entirely absent from the airwaves \(with the magnificent exception of National Public Radio\). Thus, it is not inevitable that the computer will be used to promote sequential, logical, and complex thought among the mass of people. There are, for example, economic and political interests that would be better served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer games, to use and be used by computers without understanding. In this way the computer would remain mysterious and under the control of a bureaucratic elite. There would be no need to educate the young, and childhood could, without obstruction, continue on its journey to oblivion."
I’ve read both Postman books, and Infinite Jest, but I’m adding End of Childhood to Goodreads, thanks.
There's a Monty Python sketch where someone comes up with the funniest joke in the world and dies laughing after penning it. It's eventually learned that anyone who reads or hears the joke immediately laughs themselves to death. Of course, eventually the army gets a hold of it to use as a weapon.
"Click" and "Tap" are essentially the same thing (on a desktop vs. on a mobile device): the user actively selecting what content to view next. So are "scroll" and "autoplay" (for text/image and video content, respectively). In the former, the user has agency over what to view, and in the latter, the transition is automated.
I'm very skeptical that fully automated UI will ever replace giving the user a small selection of recommended items.
The TikTok fyp is vastly better than the Instagram discover tab, which gives you a menu of videos as jumping off point before you get sucked into scrollhole. I agree about autoscroll though. Sometimes I want to watch a video like 10 times, and feel very annoyed when Instagram had the auto scroll feature. I think it's gone now. Instead it just nudges the video up with a little messages that tells me to scroll for more. I always thought that must be a first-time user tutorial, but it never stops, so either it's broken or it's broken.
Click in the article refers to plain old web navigation. There are links on the page, you move the mouse around and click on whichever one you want.
Tap is referring to "Stories" interaction, which is more narrowed and less user choice than click. A story is playing, you tap anywhere on the screen and the next story replaces it and begins playing.
I actually think "tap" and "swipe" are basically the same? They are both just a "give me the next one please" interaction. But the rest do progress from more user-directed to more computer-controlled.
(Click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay)
The discussion concerning trends needs to clearly address which perspective the analysis involves... The OP looks as if it involves recommendations for development trends moving forward, rather than serving advice based on the perspective of creators and contributors of content... That's fine, but the article refers to the Kardassians being upset as creators, as if there aren't tons of other unsponsored creators and app users (without their own TV shows) involved in the process of keeping these platforms vibrant and alive.
As social media apps brutally run towards profit making, they are underestimating the value of creators. If they continue that trend, they will basically turn into pre-programmed TV channels... Losing the very aspect of participation they are built upon. If most app users on TikTok are publishing content, after cycles of being ignored, they simply stop logging in... Not viewing other content, not buying items shown in ads, not engaging, and thus making the app die.
The ideal of opportunity and growth on platforms for independent creators is largely being hijacked on a regular basis, and creators are catching onto it just now, after years of working for little to no reward on platforms that became rich.
There seems to be a constant sentiment to capture the market in order to be a monopoly among social platforms, but the rug gets pulled whenever they do things that alienate users and creators. Instead of thinking about technological advancement and capabilities of platforms, we need to start looking deeply at the value this platforms add to the lives of individuals beyond frivolous entertainment, because instead of creating a user account, for entertainment we could simply watch television, which doesn't sell us the ideal that we can all meaningfully participate and require us to scroll through it on a phone all day.
One interesting bit is if you’re making vegetables when everyone else is giving away heroin it’s not enough to just to make great vegetables, you really need to offer something that can’t exist outside of what you’ve built because your core technology does something different.
I think Urbit’s distribution and handling of auth could be that for distributed DevEx and building collaborative apps in a way that’s way simpler than on the current web stack. It’s not quite there yet but there’s a path to this reality and success is among the potential outcomes.
The ID model is probably where I'd start since it's what fixes spam/moderation problem in a way that can actually work without centralization. When IDs have a small, but non-zero cost spam becomes uneconomical and it's easy to block an ID. IDs also accrue pseudonymous reputation. From there you can start to fix a lot of the other stuff.
The DevEx bit also heavily depends on that. When you build the OS to handle IDs you move the abstraction up the stack. Modern operating systems don't do this in part because they were built before the web. As a result modern operating systems are largely just machines user's use to open a web browser and every centralized web application has to rebuild their entire auth stack and all of the collaboration tooling. They're incentivized to do this and be incompatible with everything else because centralization tends to lead to ad-driven business models and all the incentive problems associated with that.
If the OS handled IDs and collaboration you could just build your app, distribute it to the network and rely on built in OS libraries to do the complex work relying on guarantees from the OS itself. The users wouldn't need accounts on a bunch of centralized services.
People have tried to do this on the unix stack, but it fails for a few reasons[0][1]. It's not impossible to build something else that could work though and rethinking the stack from first principles leads to something that could work.
Imagine if all linux users could just dm each other because the OS itself handled encrypted communication between IDs. You could build and distribute linux apps without a mess of complexity just by publishing it to your node. You get the capability to build really collaborative applications out of the box because of a lot of these guarantees without having to give up control. There's a lot more possible than this in this model - I think it's a path to escape the local maximum we've been trapped in and get closer to the web the 90s cypherpunks imagined (and the personal computer hackers before them).
[0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...
This entire article is built on the wrong premise that people use social media for entertainment. I certainly don't — I'm not open to any content discovery on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter at all. I use social media to connect with people I mostly already know, and the platforms getting in the way, begging with their "you may enjoy this" is bloody annoying. I'm building my own fediverse project for a reason, after all.
1 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-no...
The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social media: liberals like me and the many libertarians on here usually feel that the War on Drugs has been a catastrophe, alongside pretty much all prohibition aimed at people who are turning to escapism because the rungs of the real-world achievement ladder have been knocked out above them.
I personally believe that explosive growth in escapism (see: opioid crisis) is driven by shitty opportunities in the real world. There is always going to be some set of highly potent diversions, and there will always be some fraction of the population that has a hard enough time with them to need professional help. But IMO none of Internet pornography, painkillers, video games, or crazy-optimized recommender systems are going to destroy lives and societies in job lots if those societies have high mobility in real-word achievement. So, not our society right now.
I'm probably biased having worked in social media in my life, but the flip side is that I also know how how the sausage is made, I think that sort of balances out. Everyone has to form their own opinion here, my point can be TLDR'd as: "decriminalize drugs" and simultaneously "fuck TikTok" isn't really a consistent worldview. It's reasonable to say "fuck marketing TikTok to children" alongside "decriminalize drugs", and I'd probably agree with both.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...
It's fun to speculate on why that's the case, but it seems likely intractable to nail down.
Although, I'll point out that while they're both categories of addiction, pension funds can only invest in and make profits from the more "innocent-feeling" category.
I'd guess that, if there were a regulatory environment that allowed for public companies that could legally encourage people to indulge their $taboo_addiction, then said $taboo_addiction would cease to be taboo and become more prevalent, for better and worse.
Our society isn't high mobility? Who has a higher mobility?
(* I realise this is the internet but I'm assuming you're talking about one of the five-eyes nations)
I appreciate that’s like one human lifetime and high economic mobility had barely started to come in for e.g. black people before rich people decided to loot the place, but we were headed in the right direction for many decades before this kleptocracy-in-broad-daylight shit kicked in.
And #27 is worse than it sounds, because most people know there are ~200 sovereign states in the word (195 at the moment I believe), and the WEF only has data on 82 of them for this metric (I'm willing to assume that the "no data" ones wouldn't score highly in most cases). So that's "a bit better than halfway up the list", not "clearly competitive with the leaders".
And the ratio keeps getting “better”. Better content, less friction.
Scary.
I don't think we'll ever reach that. I'm sure there will be non-invasive methods, soon enough.
Sounds like the dream. I hope I live to experience it.
See: https://www.are.na/
1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR
2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate
3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay
By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers of the brain... but not by much.
Makes me wonder if there's a market for the equivalent of health food where we go back to social media and deliberately avoid "recommendation media" (which may be the most important two words in the entire post).