To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life. The large-scale effect is decidedly negative, though.
As an aside - word you may have been looking for is irrespective, or perhaps just plain old regardless. irregardless is not a word.
Lots of dictionaries disagree. But not me! I'll join you on this hill, regardless of what those dumb dictionaries say.
The misuse of "literally" and the common use of "irregardless" are the red pills that have turned me into a crotchety old ... prescriptivist.
That means they disagree with you on the definition of the word, but it doesn't make it a synonym of figuratively.
Is that figurative speech?
If I say "I literally broke my arm" after I actually broke my arm, that use is completely correct. But you cannot be literally dead and still type a message, unless it's an automated message that you ordered someone/something to send AFTER you died.
If the answer to this is to avoid the word "literally", and instead replace it with "really, actually, truly" (like I did above), then I might just decide to retire from haunting.
OMG A GOAST SO SPOOKY
Would you be less likely to interpret it as such if the speaker has omitted "literally"?
I would say that that is an example of hyperbole. "I am so figuratively dead right now it's as if I am literally dead." The meaning of literally, there, remains intact.
In the same way, when someone complains that you left them waiting for "days" we don't say "sometimes days means ten minutes" but that sometimes people exaggerate.
So if it’s good enough for Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace, then it’s good enough for me. Literally.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/the-300-year-history-of-using...
There’s beating a dead horse, and there’s railing about the injustice of it all in the shadow of a great oak growing over the horses grave.
"Irregardless" is absolutely a word. It's not a word I personally like, but there's no denying its status.
A number of times now Youtube has shown me a video recommendation that I ignored for days. The thumbnail with that stupid "gobsmacked" expression of the creator (:-O) with some dumb headline in big block letters ("IS GRAVITY A LIE?"). You know what I'm talking about.
Then I finally get around to looking at it closer, and it turns out it's one of my favorite channels with an awesome video! They went with the stupid title and thumbnail because "the algorithm demands it". The actual video itself is great.
These creators get an automatic click from me as well, except when I'm mislead by the thumnail and title into not even realizing it's one of them. Then it takes time for me to discover it. There's been a couple of times where the video I'm mentally spam-filtering appears on the HN front page, and it turns out to be a great video. But had I not seen it here, I would never have clicked on it.
The end result is I don't use their discovery crap at all, because it all looks like garbage I don't care about.
My use of Youtube has become very similar to my use of Xitter - never log in, almost never look at content on their domains, only on other peoples' sites.
I'm sure it works for them on average.
We can assume the metrics, we can see the results, and both seem to line up.
When you DO click on them they're almost always the most mundane things imaginable.
> To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life.
I'd argue it's mostly the latter. Most creators produce content to make money, catering to demand.
Ancient Aliens BS, TikTok reaction videos, blatant staged animal rescues, celebrity drama... this is what the general populace regards as interesting and useful. These are all genuinely popular and sought-after content.
It is a dopamine trap. People want to feel good knowing something special, feel a shared emotional bond, feel the world has good, or that they are almost a socialite... and they'll fight tooth and nail if that perception is challenged.
In my early experience of social media, people were criticized for not writing correct English. That is almost gone. Infact, now people realize that people belonging to different backgrounds can't be expected to perform in one particular context. There is reverse sort of meme, where non-natives are celebrated for writing perfect English. Similarly, there was debate on how to actually spell Quran or Koran etc. Now people understand the intention behind the words rather than actual grammer or spelling. It takes time for higher level of ideas to percolate social media.
The simple answer, apart from historical origins of words is "error correction". It is far easier to error correct words which are far apart in spelling and audio space.
relevant : https://youtu.be/AZX6awZq5Z0?t=3107
No, you and I don't want to look at staged animal rescues or celebrity drama... but if the average person does, then so does at least 50% of the population. We're in the minority.
Spiders Georg would like a word with you. And 99.99% of people have more than the average number of legs. And "the average person" is not something you can actually imagine. Think about "the average driver". You're actually thinking of an asshole driver, because asshole drivers are more salient. You don't notice "the average driver".
I can see how a YouTube channel gets attention-optimized to hell, but then I am able to find content that is genuinely amazing that have survived the temptation to over-optimize for engagement.
A common breaking point for creators is the ones where they have job X that makes a decent living, but their content starts getting popular and starts making a decent living. That's where the creator starts running into the 2 masters problem. Do they quit their job and make content only? If they do, will the platform decide to completely screw them over with an algorithm change?
Then you have a 3rd class that is just jumping into content for the purpose of making money by any means possible. All aboard the over-optimization train.
Sure, some of it is just scams and politics (yeah yeah the jokes write themselves). But at core there are people who have an actual thing to sell, and people who want to buy things. It may not make them happy in the end but that's up to each of us to figure out for ourselves, and the philosophers.
Somewhere under all that attention is a service or a product. In the end we've got to learn which ones matter to us. That's what the attention is supposed to be for.
Not all content is intended to sell a product or service. The really great stuff is not.
Each new medium provides more power to dive into this, and each generation panics that we've crossed a never-before-crossed line. And they're correct.
But the problem lies within us as humans. This lightweight diversionary content is just what the majority of us want.
The temptation to try and rope in those extra users is often irresistible but to get them you have to tank your content to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Very few growth minded companies or content creators have escaped that trap. It requires prioritizing your principles and long-term outlook over short-term growth which is so antithetical to the typical silicon valley situation trying to tap into and keep the spigot of VC money.
Could someone please explain to me what is implied here? I've been to the USA only once, and I didn't visit neither a Costco nor a Walmart. The only difference I could point to between them, is that no "Costco people" phenomenon exists on YouTube.
Sincere thanks in advance!
At Walmart they might organize the store to get you to buy candy at the checkout line, or have a lot of less-than-healty options to tempt you near the essentials, to maximize the profit in that way. Because you're not shopping at Walmart because you want to be.
Disclaimer: I haven't been to Costco at a long time. And they still try to get you in their own way with free samples you can find all over the store.
It's not just that they're poor. There's something about wal mart.
(https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-men's-merino-wool-... btw)
Costco requires a yearly membership to shop there, which along with the shopping (if you go for the more expensive membership anyway) also gives you yearly cash back on all your purchases, which if you go there for the essentials you can, really does add up quite a bit. My wife and I get basically everything we can from there and usually end up with about $250 of essentially free money per year, and despite being Costco cash, if you go there and don't spend it all, you just get cash in return. Clearly they want you to use it there, but it is required.
Additionally there's an element of curation, though this is more subjective. Walmart will sell anything they can get their hands on, and Costco by comparison has a reputation for selling not exactly the top end bespoke stuff, but at least good stuff. I can recall maybe 2 times in the entire time I've shopped there for the last 6 years or so that I've gotten something I was disappointed in the quality of.
In addition you have the other things like the free samples everywhere, there's much less impulse buying on offer, it just feels... I don't know, you just feel like they actually give a shit? Maybe not a huge shit but a shit and finding businesses that give even a microscopic shit is pretty hard these days. And along with that, they pay their employees extremely well (in the context of retail anyway).
And also like, it's a bit classist for sure, but I do enjoy that there are no "people of Walmart" there, for the same reason I go to Target instead of Walmart for whatever I can't get at Costco. It seems at times Target's entire business model is knowing people who can will pay about 11% more for everything so they can not go to Walmart, I certainly do and will continue to.
I was not exaggerating or embellishing about the bumper cart bit. People either come flying out of aisles without looking or they stand there blocking an aisle while ignoring you trying to get through. A slow-moving mob would be an improvement in every way.
Between that and Walmart having narrower aisles than most stores, the place feels busy even when there aren't many people in it.
Also, the workers and shoppers alike all seem depressed, which is another thing I've not experienced in any other store. Walmart's weird, sickly lighting and color scheme probably don't help.
It's a miserable place to be in. Mood instantly plummets on entering. Combo of the seemingly intended-to-make-you-feel-bad design, and the people.
It's not even just a poor-people thing. Aldi is fine. Dollar General isn't as depressing. Plus, wal mart didn't used to be so bad, but that was like 20 years ago.
It's not just the stores, the parking lots are like that too. I won't refuse to go to wal-mart, but unless I'm lazy or it's an emergency, I will absolutely drive by one to shop at Target, Best Buy, etc.
Walmart is known for having ... characters in its stores. Think severely obese woman wearing a bikini. Walmart will let anyone in and anyone includes some wild people because wild people exist.
Costco requires a yearly membership and a contract. If you come sauntering in wearing assless chaps you're likely to get kicked out, your contract revoked, and being unable to ever shop there again.
The comparison being made was trying for a specific audience and excluding those outside of that audience (Costco) vs trying to appeal to as large an audience as possible, which means accepting things that most people wouldn't otherwise accept (Walmart).
Costco is typically middle class. It is a members-only.
They also have a famous hot dog and food court
You won't believe number 7!
Better content seeks quality connections that may scale so far.
Engaging content seeks quantity of connections.
Of course this could be further argued. Maybe the better and engagement is interpreted to mean too distribution in quantity focused.
Edit:typo
View time, remaining on platform, etc.
I get the impression it is about being seen doing things. If nobody sees you do something it basically never happened. The more people that see you do something the more important it is to them.
human connection doesn't scale
Before they tried to figure out why certain schools were always failing (curriculum, etc), they honed in on another very simple cause. Overcrowded classrooms. Soon as you go from 18 kids per room, to 28, you’re in trouble.
The internet didn’t become any more or less of anything. It just scaled the base initial value of numofHumansInvolved to 8 billion. But’s the only thing that scaled, that number.
It’s like scaling water pipes out throughout the city without scaling filtering system also. You are still basically circulating dirty water.
This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse.
People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common.
The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to what they all have in common, it becomes very surface level.
Therefore all things that want to get mass approval must be very basic, vague, and shallow. This is the capitalist way of creating content.
Conversely, when real artists struck chords with large groups of people, it was because they stumbled upon something unique that many people shared. This unique thing was then valued by large groups of people, and became culture.
Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it.
Art must always start that way, or else it is simply content.
//EDIT
I also want to add that this is not a new thing and it's root cause is not social media. It is any media that is shared, whose goal is a large number of eyeballs. This has happened with every medium and will continue to happen forever.
If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.
But when a teenager makes a tiktok about the pain of being rejected by their crush, and it's a feeling many people have shared, and many people like it, that's basic, vague and shallow.
What makes it "not culture" is that everyone is watching one or few of those hundred thousand fully exchangeable tiktoks.
A thing which is basic, vague and shallow can become an important cultural work too - it just must become known to approximately everyone in a society. It must somehow become the one representative work in its class, so that when someone makes a reference, everyone knows exactly which work is being talked about, and that everyone else knows it too. Being unique is not strictly necessary, but is highly helpful.
I wonder if the difference with tiktok is that there are thousands of videos about the same thing, everyone sees a few of those thousands, but they see a different few. So even though we're sharing the feeling, culturally, we're not sharing the same artifact.
Like maybe the trouble is that tiktok puts each user into their own custom bubble, and the bubble the user finds themself in is completely opaque - you can't readily compare what you're seeing to what your friends are seeing?
As for the sculptures and paintings of Mary, etc., I'd say they are all boring and entirely interchangeable, but that's because I have no connection to any of them. Each such work is meaningful to the community that had a personal connection. But I'd say none of them are culturally important, except those individual ones that for some reason (like being very old) become widely known among people outside artifact-adjacent community.
Side point: culture always has a scope. Something may be important cultural object for the city I live in, unremarkable for anyone else in my country, and entirely unknown the rest of the world. With the Internet enabling arts and entertainment on demand, there is little overlap between communities we live in and the entertainment choices of individual community members. We end up having communities with no culture.
So, first, any art that is funded by the church or a patron is not really in this conversation. The entire economics of that art is outside of the eyeball conversation.
If art that is pre-funded strikes a chord with people, it is the same thing as I said about artists in the past. Like Coltraine or Hendrix, they expressed something unique or personal that it was discovered that all people shared, and it therefore became culture.
There are mounds upon mounds of crappy pre-funded religious art that impacted no-one whatsoever. So Pietra is precisely the opposite of pop art, although that is what it became. Which is what makes it culture.
How many times have you seen an 'old tired' joke that's been told by an expert storyteller and it's funny yet again?
Capitalism is just people making agreements with each other in a legal framework. It 100% does not preclude charitable work, volunteerism, or art. It also doesn't value anything; it's a system where, as much as possible, people can do what they want and pay for things they deem to be valuable.
> If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.
This is true. Pain creates wonderful art.
just as socialism values... society
also, you're conflating markets with capitalism
I'd say almost everything but capitalism values authoritarianism. E.g. socialism in the end by "society" means "the state".
Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools. Not bureaucrats taking your effort and doling it out (or not) as they see fit.
Are you saying that sports are not profitable in America? That schools and colleges in America are not run for profit? That churches and charities are not formed primarily for financial/tax benefits? Or that people can't play non-profit basketball in their local park under socialism? Or that capitalism hasn't done a work on the 'local community' by replacing third-places with places that require you to spend money to hang out, for example?
> "Not bureaucrats taking your effort and doling it out (or not) as they see fit."
This is exactly what my employer does? They take value I add, and dole it out (or not) as they see fit.
That's correct; I'm not saying those things.
> This is exactly what my employer does? They take value I add, and dole it out (or not) as they see fit.
How does your employer dole out your effort?
Then your claim "Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools." has fallen over. Those things are taken over by capitalism-slash-markets because there is profit to be made, above all other concerns (e.g. the health of football players / brain trauma, the constant advertising, the promotion of players to celebtrities and the association of product with celebrity, etc. etc. These things are community-destroying but profit-making.
Even then they are voluntarily playing football as probably by far their best option in life. Paid for by hundreds of millions of people who want to watch the best football possible, and will pay for it.
Finally, people choosing to pay for things isn't capitalism taking over culture. Everything about football requires money: paying for a football to go for a kickaout isn't hideous commercialism.
Capitalism works best with a non-authoritarian government, but that leaves a lot of different options for implementing how that is handled.
Individual capitalists will almost always push for some of authoritarianism as they become more successful because they will seek to minimize competition.
How so?
> Individual capitalists will almost always push for some of authoritarianism
Lots will push the other way, because that keeps the engine running smoothly. This is sometimes called "people thinking they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires", but really it's "people knowing the best way (on average) to invent a better future".
Shakespeare has exactly this going on too, though. He contributed like a thousand neologisms to English that actually stuck. That probably doesn't happen unless your art is a bit like science, almost "discovering" something in the collective unconcious rather than an act of invention. When that happens, you have something that's new/unique but also something that is deep/universal. Cubism and surrealism are also like this
That would still be valuable in disseminating those neologisms further and giving them staying power, but it's less discovery and more documenting.
But the interesting thing is that there's still nothing that makes it fundamentally impossible to start a relatively small forum nowadays. And there are plenty of those small communities that still exist! And yet... somehow, that's just not good enough, is it? We are all still constantly complaining about the attention economy and the performative nature of online communication. So what gives?
To me, what this says is that it's not good enough for small-band, high authenticity communication to exist. It also needs to be true that broadband, inauthentic communication NOT exist. The simple truth, I think, is that it annoys us when things we don't like manage to capture lots of attention. When you see something you disagree with gathering momentum, it _grates_. There is something fundamental about that; "get over it" isn't going to solve this.
You saw this happen with Reddit: slowly, the most popular subreddits became bigger and bigger cesspits. People always suggested that the way around this was to just ignore the popular stuff and find smaller subreddits to enjoy. But it just never resonated with people as a solution. Ignoring the popular subreddits as a lost cause feels like putting your head in the sand. Don't bother trying to explain to me that you can't fix discourse all by yourself, or that there's no sense in sweating what the front page of reddit looks like. You're not arguing with me! You're arguing with the millions of people's inner id, who see that front page and twitch a little bit.
I think this might speak to some human need to assert our own view of the world and reject untruths that we've already ourselves debunked. When you see somebody pronouncing an old thing you _used_ to believe, your impulse is to warn that person "oh no, I can see why you'd think that, but it's actually more complicated than that for reasons x, y and z." But imagine that you see somebody drowning in falsity and before you can reach them to disabuse them of their misapprehension, thousands and thousands of people crowd around them, agreeing and cheering! And then, before you can push through the crowd and take the podium, they all disperse into the void. You can't call them all back and explain that they just walked away with the wrong information... they're just.. gone. Gone, carrying the virus of bad ideas out into the aether, now sure to awaken somewhere else, like wack-a-mole. Something about human nature finds this situation insufferable. But the twittersphere is perfectly designed to make it _the only way we communicate_!
To bring it home, I think our need to right wrongs is what doesn't scale. We can't all convince everybody of our own world view, but globally networked, systematically visible communication baits us into doing exactly that. Once pandora's box is opened, we can't ignore the temptation to participate, nor can we ignore the constant insult of participating.
I would disagree. There are a few things that make it exceedingly difficult (though not impossible)
1. Other platforms breathing up all the air in the room. No one's going to be giving your attention if they are being rage baited on twatter all day.
2. DDOS, and attack tools make it easy to blast your site totally off the internet the first time a troll gets pissed at you for one reason or another. You'll end up having to be behind CloudFlare or paying for some service to even exist.
3. If your site does gain the smallest amount of popularity the spammers and the bots will come, and you will spend a lot of time and effort to get rid of it. Eventually you are a worn out husk of a human being as you spend more and more time, money, and effort figuring out what is and isn't authentic on your forum.
I think the original sin of Elon-Twitter is mistaking popularity for authenticity - because by definition authenticity isn't universally recognizable. It's how authentic experience is unexpected, arbitrary, incomplete and often contradictory. People being authentic in a world you're not familiar with looks like...nothing? Often? When The Bear came out it showed the characters drinking out of plastic 'to-go' containers because there's no glass allowed in most commercial kitchens[1]. It had the smell of authenticity - but you wouldn't see it if you didn't know what was authentic already.
Authenticity is just not a "universally recognizable" thing. At the 'whole system' level, if you want to promote it, you should be afraid of nearly universally loved content. That content is usually too 'cooked' to really be authentic. You want the less complete stuff.
[1] https://twitter.com/dillllllo/status/1557562291801006081
And then from the inside, you get stuff like The Fandom which goes into the real human stories behind the animals rather than gawking at the rarest but most visible aspect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY
It's authentic. Someone on the outside would probably recognize the difference (someone doing just another documentary/interview vs someone pointing a camera at her own community), but might not recognize the outside view as inauthentic.
There's an aspect of...how any complex trend will inevitably have some aspects that would appear to outsides like they were included by mistake...but insiders will assure you are essential and typical. You need insiders to guide you because, as outsiders, you can't understand.
There are online communities beyond X and, event within X you can just choose to track select groups you follow and constantly unfollow what you don't like.
As an aside, I find this phrase funny today. In the past, I would have known you are using the term 'X' to be a generic reference to online communities. Today, I don't know if you are talking specifically about twitter or just a generic online community.
The people that say they do are just unaware of all the diversity they reject.
Strangely, I don't feel the same way when some wisdom traditions remind us that we are mortal (a bag of bones comes to mind), or in response to a number of other diminishing epithets. Weird.
I think it is quite funny and want to encourage people to use the term.
Meatspace, to me, is a term that encapsulates the authenticity of being a blood and bone human being and all of the foibles that come with it. Cyberspace, at least so far as social media is concerned, is a perpetual performance where what matters is how strangers feel about you and how they feel about you is often indepedant of what you actually do in meatspace.
To me cyberspace shines with a much stronger contempt for humanity than meatspace. Meatspace simply demands you be the lump of meat that you are while cyberspace demands that you please a judgemental and often quarrelsome mob.
And I remember not understanding at all because these weren't friends and who the hell can handle having hundreds or thousands of friends?
I never understood MySpace and in many ways I still don't understand Facebook (I do on a rational level but not an emotional one).
I'd rather have 3-4 lifelong friends than thousands of online friends. And that doesn't mean you can't make real connections with people online, just that doing so takes years of effort just like offline friends, so doesn't scale, just like you said.
Religions have already for centuries scaled that, mostly by being an idol & not getting personal. Whether that's a priest, or a Tibetan Lama, they normally don't mingle, they do this be not being "authentic" but by representing an idea or principle.
That's what a lot social media "influecners" are trying to accomplish. And what personal branding attempts to do.
Is it wanted? Probably not. But it's definitely somethng that connect to the human psyche.
It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale. It's valuable precisely because it takes a lot of time, energy, and luck to establish. You want authenticity? Go find community in meatspace. You want authenticity online? Talk to those meatspace friends in private group chats.