Doesn't seem that much different from a fashion magazine interview about what X celebrity likes to wear. Those have been around for quite a long time.

I could throw in an example of how I'll watch boring videos of a couple playing with their birds for 90 minutes on Youtube. You can link me to the Wikipedia page on slow TV (via Norway), and it won't erase the simple, boring, straightforward, fact that it is a phenomenon.

“Other than”? Obviously, as social media didn't exist. “Better than” or “more relevant to the things for which there celebrity status was used to direct attention”? Not particularly.

I'm not sure how watching lightweight videos on subjects you're curious about is any worse than how people wasted time in the past?

Personally I waste time watching videos on outdoor gear, coffee making equipment and PC hardware. I certainy don't regret it because I had no plans to do anything productive with that time either.

I think so, too.

I guess quality was a property of interest in the old days, because the path e.g. for commercial music was: Maximize profit -> Maximize sales -> Maximize what the target audience likes -> Maximize quality.

For TikTok etc. they bypass the market sales stuff and replace it by an 'algorithm', that optimizes for retention, which is tightly coupled to ad revenue. I imagine the algorithm as a function of many arguments.

Just relying on quality is an inefficient approximation in contrast to that.

Agreement to eat said head apparel is predicated upon "infectious energy" (i.e. quality) - NOT success. I'll draft up a more officious document later.

Note: I am the sole arbiter of what constitutes quality.

What blew my mind was that there would be a market to watch other people play video games. You never know what catches on.

I've been really thinking about lawns lately and how much time men and women spend maintaining them, how much pride many of them have in such activity... lawns aren't real tho, it's just a personal park nobody ever uses that we all thought we wanted bc rich ppl had them. Front lawns especially, just for looks, nobody normal ever sits on them even.

Case in point is all the people that live in an apartment - they don't do lawns. They might think they want to and some might even enjoy up keeping a lawn but it's not an activity that's "worth it" in fact there are many reasons not have a lawn, it isn't an activity that justifies itself as so many pretend.

Everything is like that. Almost nothing any of us do adds to humanities' general progress or improves our own situations even.

Mowing a lawn and watching TV are incredibly similar activities if you have a nice lawnmower.

I couldn't agree more. In a broad sense, it's like we've lost contact with our own lives, communities, and cultures. I don't think those things are "dead", but they mean things now which are totally different than what they meant even only a couple of decades ago, and the people living through it sort of know that and kind of say it out loud sometimes even, but can't really wrap their heads around it at the same time and continue to ape the old behaviours (no offence, anyone, I do it too).

"Traditions" live on in a sort of zombie state... we cut the grass, we present the gift cards. It's an odd and fun(ny) moment to be alive.

So like supermarket magazines in video form? I think people would get it.