When researching+writing this, did you find it useful to look through McLuhan's "Medium is the Message" lens? If so, what are the "message" implications of this ouroboric/circular/whirlpool medium?
Some of us just can't work up the energy to answer a question, but if we see something wrong, it doesn't sit well with us, and we have to correct it.
And yes, sometimes when I see a question I can answer, it gives me the energy to answer it ... but not always ...
It's possible to make 80% of people mad, 20% of people happy, and benefit from the 20% while the 80% can't do anything to you.
To be fair, while shorts is clearly designed to generate high virality and compete w/ TikTok, YouTube does incentivize longer form content. For regular videos the platform appears to optimize for engagement at about the 10 minute mark.
Political/social discourse is complex and I believe goes beyond a simple soundbite problem. One could argue this began with 24 hour news cycles with all the time in the world, and news had to become entertainment to fill the space. The movie "Network" presaged this sensationalized this culture situation well before it became a thing, and certainly well before social media was conceptualized.
If they only gave you the option to remove shorts from results...
In fairness, this is how the world has always been.
In the US for instance, back when there were only 3 networks and a channel for public tv, people were "reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues".
"He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-seen-wearing-glasses_n_...
It's very easy to realize you're "different" from other people, but can't place your finger on it, yet manage to make up for the differences in odd and creative ways!
TV was also required to air a minimal amount of educational television for children under 16 during the day. I learn way more on days home sick (latchkey kid) than I'd learn at days in school.
Shouting "SO AND SO MAYBE MIGHT HAVE POSSIBLY DID THIS BAD THING BUT I DON'T HAVE ANY EVIDENCE!" from the rooftops won't provoke much action as shouting the same but reinforcing that it is definitely true, for sure, of course it is.
Then with human behaviour/intelligence there's the spectrum of people who care about fact-finding or not and will react according to new information depending on this. Some of it is general laziness, they can't be bothered fact finding, and some of it is tribal, they accept x must be true because it's about y tribe where they're a member of z tribe.
That's why it's so easy for politics, big tech, etc to manipulate people; because we're all still monkeys!
Contrapoints (eg the Twilight one), Big Joel's (recently made a 6hr one!), FoldingIdeas and so on. It's a very different model, and a number of these creators also make videos for Nebula.
It's a very different business model, and it doesn't have the potential to become as profitable as Mr Beast.
If you have 15k patreon subs those are guaranteed views around your video's publish time, which presumably is a good thing for their algorithmic weight.
if your channel doesn't have dedicated enough fans to do that it's not gonna work on you. and you almost certainly aren't getting news coverage of your review of a star wars hotel, you know? Jenny is rare for that.
On the "not even wrong" front, in the Pauli sense of the phrase: she's a relatively minor success, you'll find 20 police bodycam video accounts created in the last year that get 10x views.
There is a pattern with well-known creators that are more video-essay than intensifying whirlpoolers or whatever, where they keep YouTube productions to a handful of high-quality videos a year, and monetize via Patreon with less well-polished videos published much more frequently.
My guess is that if all you want to do is work the algorithm to get views then you’re going to get worked by the algorithm.
We need to slow down and to connect back to nature
We need to build maps and steering wheels.
I might even suspect that solving collective action is the great filter that we have in front of us.
There's something to be said about the structuralist part of it: using large amounts of text as a rule set to return a semblance of truth seems to be a structuralist's wet dream.
It's like drawing the map for the king: the real is being represented by reducing a huge number of data points to a mixture of randomness and hard rules that pretend to be real.
At the very least it's a form of hyperreality as far as I understand it.
Fundamentally it's about language. What does a word or a sentence represent? How do you go from a spoken or written text to something that is meaningful to you if it's presented to you?
This intermediating process of communication is highly complicated and fraught with misconceptions which lead to lots of fuzzy logic being applied by your brain when trying to understand something.
The stuff that's happening between hearing or reading something and you actually taking it in as something meaningful is a vast space which is as of yet unexplored and gives a lot of room for speculation. This is what Beaudrillard (and others) tried to describe and analyze.
And it has nothing to do with math. Math is a whole other story and won't solve the problem for you because it's a different kind of medium (or text if you will). Math sits between you and the other while language is something in yourself, so to speak.
LLM's try to gather meaning from text stochastically. This is not the way we gather meaning as humans and in a sense this is not how communication works in the real.
But Beaudrillard (and others) reasoned that we left the real and live in hyperreality. The most famous example of his is Disney World: As soon as it existed it started to infuse itself into our everyday lives. The simulation of a fantasy world (the real existing Disney World theme park) has started to become real outside of it but not rooted in reality (it became a simulacrum): it is an emulation of reality. In that sense it is virtual. It's like virtual reality in the real world, it's a fantasy you can touch (and that can be sold and be molded to be sold more successfully).
The idea of sociability in social media is another example: it does not exist in the real sense, it is mediated by technology. Its origins are hinted at by using terminology of social interactions but in the end it's a transactional empty sort of sociability which promotes attention seeking and fast, easily digested pieces of symbolism over actual interactions. And more and more this kind of "new" sociability becomes part of our actual social lives.
Though now that I think of it, didn't that only happen when their power was on the way out, replaced by trucks and container ships ?
Perhaps language is fundamentally metaphorical, and perhaps reality is actually abstract.
Leaf through the BoingBoing BBS sometime to get a sense for it.
"The right wing is off the rails, here is a list of various lunatics each with audiences in the tens of millions. There are actual theocratic and neo-Nazi elements just one or two hops away from the President."
The left is crazy too, just look at the BoingBoing BBS!"
Good lord do you hear yourself?
As an exercise, try coming up with some metric to measure it. Could be inflammatory posts, or the comment count on inflammatory posts. Compare BB BBS with some rough equivalent right-leaning place. You'll find it's worse in the right-leaning forum, no doubt.
But the phenomena exists on both sides of the political spectrum.
Many trends among one side of the political spectrum are mirrored to a lesser extent on the other side as well, and that's interesting don't you think?
It’s far more interesting to me how one side of the political spectrum was so totally swallowed by this system, to the extent that literally every single news story is received with outlandish conspiracy theorizing from rather mainstream right wing media.
The null hypothesis is that actually both sides should be equally distorted, but it is very obviously the case they are not. That is what deserves inquiry.
It not obvious and also doesn't seem true at all. Still one may continue to investigate with this assumption but then result will neither be truth or much useful.
https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-t...
If I had to guess, I'd say such thinking is more widespread on the right, but I find it very difficult to see these sort of things clearly since I'm generally left-leaning in my politics.
I haven’t heard anyone say our justice system is primarily profit-driven, and certainly haven’t heard any notable mainstreamers taking that position. One could argue lefties overplay the significance/effects of commercial incentives, but I also think it’s defensible to say there should be (to the extent possible) no commercial incentives in incarceration whatsoever.
“Project 2025 is more than an idea, it's a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will. This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers. We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late."
https://huffman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congre...
"Currently, many think that the goals of [American Prison System] APS are to rehabilitate inmates and help them function properly in the real world. However, the APS’s high recidivism rate and methods of revenue creation support the conclusion that increasing the prison population may be the real goal of the APS."
https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/2018/12/09/the-american-pr...
Yes, if a prison makes money from incarcerating people, its natural goal will be to incarcerate people.
For-profit prisons also have higher chances of recidivism, which bears this out as well.
"Daniel Hatcher used to work as an attorney for Maryland Legal Aid. He says he's seen American courts turn into a system that's more interested in profits than justice.
'California is pursuing billions in fines and fees, and Alabama, multiple prosecutors' offices in Alabama generate 70% of their total funding solely by the pursuit of these court ordered fines and fees against the poor,' Daniel Hatcher says.
Hatcher says that when profit becomes the point, families become targets of the very justice system that is meant to protect."
The suggestion that profit is "the point" of California's criminal fines and fees seems absolutely wild to me.
> I haven’t heard anyone say our justice system is primarily profit-driven, and certainly haven’t heard any notable mainstreamers taking that position.
I suppose you can find someone to say any ol' opinion on the vast Internet. I'll consider clause 1 to be disproven and clause 2 to stand.
That would be reflected in the election results, and not in the way you're implying.
I posted a court settlement for the crime of knowingly producing untrue, defamatory outrage at massive scale.
Note how mine is evidence for my argument. Yours is evidence for nothing at all.
Luigi's selfless act of heroism on the behalf of the American middle and lower classes should be treated as such.
You'll find that United Fraudcare doesn't discriminate on left/right when it comes to denying care to those who need it most. The same can be said for the victims of United denying them services that they paid handsomely for over the course of several years.
The problem here is that people confuse left/right with Democrat/Republican and seem to think that Trump is on the right just because he used the Republican party : he is no more on the right than the Nazis, who deployed both left leaning and right leaning policies when those suited them.
People who want a certain party to be in power should hold that party to a higher standard. Independent of the party. Being "better than the others" is not good enough.
Trump voters who either Approve or Neither Disapprove or Approve: 13%
Harris: 17%
Trump voters who Disapprove or Not Sure: 82%
Harris: 77%
All of these differences are within the margin of error. Good job falling for the outrage machine though!
Source: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Reactions_to...
From browsing Reddit, my impression was that the left strongly approved.
And that that the left is anywhere from 20% to 3x more likely to be undecided about the morality of an assassination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory
https://corpslakes.erdc.dren.mil/employees/motorboat/pdfs/Ma...
I generalized this to #1/#2 = % difference between the #1 and #2. It's not so much logic as it is arithmetic, but let me know if you still disagree.
If the approval rate was 0.1% and 0.2%, does it give someone the correct impression to say "Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to approve of the killing?"
After saying that sentence, would someone draw a diagram that's even remotely close to the actual probabilities and support levels?
No. Of course not. That's called deception.
If you say, "5-11% of Harris votes vs 2-8% of Trump voters approve," would someone be able to draw a diagram of probabilities that's pretty close to reality?
Yes. They would. That's called honesty.
So all you're doing here is adding to the outrage machine in, again, a really transparent, unconvincing, and deceptive manner. I know you probably think this is all clever and whatnot, but it really is wildly unimpressive.
So the question is, "of the population of folks who approve of the murder, how many are left leaning vs right?"
So your own data says that the population of murder-approvers is left leaning by a huge margin. you are the one using tricks to obfuscate that fact.
further, you are trying to malign the entire trump presidency based on his dining with a single person (and known troll) while dodging the fact that a significant contingent of Harris voters support that murder. you can't have it both ways
Your numbers: they will draw something not even close to reality
My numbers: they will draw something close to reality
That’s the whole argument. You are engaged in, again, fully transparent, unconvincing, and unimpressive deception.
And it’s weird because I don’t know who you think you’re convincing. Hopefully it isn’t you!
Not even close. Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh have been blasted by their own fans and viewers for criticising Luigi Mangioni.
My latest understanding of the US political landscape is that 2008-2024 the left got very adept at defining things as bad and then attacking those things. In 2016 the right started to learn to counter that, and in 2024 that finally died. In other words, you'll need to try harder than just calling people nazis.
You're getting downvoted because people don't buy that 1) tens of millions of their fellow Americans are lunatics and 2) that the left doesn't have their own moral failings.
Every piece of this understanding is wrong. For one thing, the far Right in American has been better and more effective at that than any part of the Democratic coalition, since at least the 1980s.
I don't need to write a treatise to explain why this is bad.
you'll just have to compete on ideas instead of word games now.
I said extreme ideologies (including the two I mentioned) are bad, and there's an asymmetry in their representation and proximity to power on the different ends of the political spectrum.
Not suggesting equivalence, in fact I would be really interested to hear theories as to why right-wing polemicists are so much more popular (and numerous) than left-wing polemicists. On the face of it, there are a lot of left-wing things to be justifiably outraged about (especially right now). So why isn't left-wing outrage reliably bankable?
I don't think it's a pattern tied to the zeitgeist, because you see it in talk radio too, which predates social media's Skinner box algorithms by decades.
Side-question: why are there more left-wing political comedians than right-wing ones?
IQ gap between the sides?
On the comedians question: some people think it's because it's easier to be funny when kicking up than kicking down.
The most common one is that poor white people are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. The average household income of a Trump voter is something like 75k - hardly poor (depending where you're at).
Anecdata: I know plenty of Trump voters who are very smart. A friend's dad has multiple PhD's and accomplished career as a theoretical physicist. He's also pretty racist. My father is a retired engineer, and doesn't like Trump, but keeps voting for him, because the Democrats are on the wrong side of issues he cares about. (Gun control, namely)
The reality is likely to be - they have used the mountains of publicly available data, and fine tuned their messages with the help of a highly partisan rage-baiting media ecosystem to capture more voters. It seems to me, the right wing is more organized, and manages to keep their voters and party members more aligned and on-message. They also have a much more voracious appetite for fighting dirty (rough talk, conspiracy theories, whisper campaigns, untraceable mailers giving wrong polling place info to black communities, etc.) - something the Democrats do not have the stomach for.
Our story-telling media is, if not actually "leftish", generally progressive in the broadest sense of that term. Struggles over gay marriage, contraception, divorce, interracial marriage, civil rights were all, as of 2010 or so, pretty much wrapped up in ways that broadly speaking reflected a progressive win.
So for quite a few decades, the conservative right have been "forced" into their own little culture bubble where you can still ask if a white person and black person should be able to marry, whether contraception violates the will of god, where evil is punished and not "understood", poverty reflects personal failure and moral flaws rather than systemic issues and so on and so forth.
That creates a strange distortion (ask any group that has been an outlier to the mainstream culture they live within), and in this particular case this has manifested as both endless outrage and conspiracy-mongering.
Of course, meanwhile, the same conservative right have won on most economic issues. Union membership and power are down, taxes on the wealthy are down, all attempts at socializing health care have been rebuffed, industries were successfully deregulated, capital gains taxes are low, the share of GDP flowing to labor is down, estate taxes barely exist, defense spending is way up, and more recently Roe has been overturned.
So there's this strange contradiction in which progressive ideas have come to dominate the cultural sphere (though this may be changing) while conservative ideas have been the most successful in the economic and political sphere. Progressives often don't recognize the success they've had, and the failure side just looks like more of the same. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to downplay their successes (because these things are actually not broadly popular) and are left facing their "losses" in the cultural sphere, which can no doubt (Dobbs not withstanding) seem pretty overwhelming.
And its rightward momentum seems to be much more liberal to me, considering how often it's about removing regulations...
On the other hand a lot of far left beliefs are very unfriendly to capitalism/large companies/billionaires/foreign adversaries, to the 'abolish capitalism' or 'eat the rich' degree. So the far right folks can more easily afford to make it their full time job, since they have other sources of funding rather than just their fans.
I suspect that left wing audiences are also more skeptical of these types of figures, and more prone to infighting. So it's harder to bring together a large audience of fanatics for left wing content, since they're divided over 50 ways to 'solve' a problem.
If there was money to be made, someone would be bankrolling it.
No sir, people of all tribes are fully capable of getting swept into rage machines. At the end of the day we are animals operating on animal instinct. No tribe gets to claim otherwise.
The right is stupid or craven or greedy or just evil, but true righteous fury is reserved for those who saw a woman's rights not getting respected one time.
I find the left goes into anger machines and ends up suggesting overzealous steps for necessary changes that take many people aback.
But that’s not new. What’s not new is that now we have social media and mainstream media that wants to fan the flames by giving voices to the most extreme.
- Fairness Doctrine killed in the 80s, resulting rise of partisan AM radio and, somewhat later, Fox News.
- Media ownership concentration rules neutered in early ‘00s (iirc). More centralization, again in the hands of big capital.
- None of those rules ever applied to the Web, so when its power as a propaganda and agitation tool skyrocketed with increased use by normal folks (rise of Facebook; usable smartphones with the iPhone) that immediately headed bad directions.
Now we have LLMs, which are at their most-useful by far when you don’t care about accuracy or reputation—so, scams and propaganda getting a big boost in productivity.
He did nothing because he had no interest in doing anything to limit corporate influence or power. They put him in power, after all.
See definition 2 here:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/literal...
Use of literally in, well, the non-literal sense dates back hundreds of years.
Not to mention, if you're using the word "literally" to mean "something that actually happened", you are also using the word wrong. Because it means "relating to or expressed in letters".
I also notice people complain about "literally", but they never complain about "really" which also gets used in the same ways even though it means the opposite.
And I've noticed people do it as a substitute for intelligence. They complain about these things to seem intelligent. To seem knowledgeable. But when confronted with knowledge that contradicts the complaint, they try to dismiss the knowledge rather than adjust their point of view. Similar with fewer/less. These words mean the same thing. There are no rules as to when to use one or the other. There was the preference of one guy, who even said that he had no reason for it, he just liked it. And people took that as an ironclad rule. Or the gif debate. People try to invent all of these rules, but get pissy when you point out all the places where English does not follow those rules.
I feel personally this is a big reason why communication across the internet is becoming much more intense and full of conflict.
The question becomes, is YouTube's algorithm good enough to itself pick up on this new market and serve it? I see no reason it couldn't. It's possible human algorithm-minders might sabotage this instinct by going 'no, this is the big win' and coaxing it towards MrBeast stuff, but surely the algorithm will eventually win out?
Something I find interesting is that there are good channels producing very high quality (non-extreme or non-intense) content for many interests on YouTube and they coexist with the hyperbolic large channels. I suppose that they make less money, but they do so without a large production crew. I think the algorithm is supporting both types of content (content for myriad mindless viewers, and content for the fewer discerning viewers) and accommodates both scales.
I think the idea that media aimed at education or sharing a passionate hobby is different from media that exists in the first place to just make money. If you start out with a goal that involves communication, I think it's more likely to stick than if your goal was just to become the Death Star from the start!
Just like it's easy for people into video games to think the latest Steam-chart topping indie hit is really popular.
And then you look up the numbers and it turns out something like FIFA (EAFC) makes more money than every single indie game on Steam combined.
I don't see much difference to the "old world" either. Yellow journalism existed in the 1800s. We just do it in a more modern format.
If you want to be a content creator on these platforms and you don't want to be captured by the algorithms you have to be very conscious that algorithmic capture is a constant danger. You have to be willing to lose algorithmic points and give up income that you're getting from the platform if push comes to shove. You have to constantly be on your guard.
When I was a kid there was Mr Wizard, and then Bill Nye, but it was far more limited than what I watch with my kid.
The land of videos with <1M views is full of gems - and many of the top notch science channels (eg Mark Rober), still give their creators a handsome income. And many of the channels, like Rober, do regularly crack 1M and the recommended list.
And if it was happening, what would it look like?
I have a theory, but I don't want to give the game away yet.
It is not created merely by the sharing of videos over the internet.
Such sharing was happening long before Google Video or YouTube existed.
Some HN commenters want readers to believe that YouTube, with its ridiculous "recommendations", is synonymous with sharing videos over a computer network... and that it's imp[ossible to share videos with people over a computer network without a "YouTube Apparatus". They warn that YouTube must exist, surveillance, advertising and recommendations are a must, or else sharing video over the internet will become impossible and terrible things will happen.
News flash. Terrible things are happening as a result of YouTube. Mosre specifically as a result of Google's surveillance and advertising tactics.
> “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content.
This idea – that meaning is replaced by intensification – helps me understand a lot about the world today.