Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind.
I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.
<quote>
What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?
Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.
From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.
</quote>
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[0] - In whatever sense models are "true", i.e. a nice way to describe reality, that's succinct and has good predictive power, or something.
[1] - https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...
[2] - Which is not the same thing as saying it turned out wrong.
We call this Parasitic Processing because it's like a parasite in that it
takes up life within you, and it takes life away from you! It causes you to
lose your agency. It causes you to suffer. And here's what's important. This
capacity for your cognitive brain to be self organizing, heuristic using,
complexify, to create complex systems and functions with emergent abilities,
has a downside to it.
This is a complex, self-organising, adaptive system! If you try and intervene
here the rest of the system reorganizes itself around your attempted
intervention. It can adapt and preserve itself as you tried to destroy it.
Why? Because it's making use of the very machinery by which You adapt, and
make use of the things that are trying to destroy You!
I think this was kind of known for a long time, and pithily described in the well known phrase, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".
A rat is in a lab, pulls a lever, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again... no treat. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. This goes on, 10 pulls with no treat, but sometimes something comes out so the rat keeps going. You get the idea.
This is a lot of social media. You end up scrolling through a lot of shit, adverts and subtle propaganda, passively absorbing it until you get rewarded with something you genuinely enjoy and get the good hormones from.
I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.
A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking require you listening to the entire song to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with anything else.
I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention.
Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.
For example, I like SOMA's Underground 80s, but I also want to hear new artists in the same vein. I haven't found any streaming stations that are actively good at curating like this.
Where are the streaming stations that play Smiths and Smithereens but also play Blossoms and Johnny Marr's new stuff, for example?
Unfortunately you're quite right about Soma (and probably other streaming radio) - but I imagine licensing new music can be difficult/expensive.
No, I think you're right.
I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been copied onto a ratty old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the CD and a decent stereo.
There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape, and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway, because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.
I got into so much music that's remained important to me because of a chance tape swap.
Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts, unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to that R'n'B playlist!"
The non-singles are generally a lot less "radio-friendly", almost by definition, so a lot of artists were more willing to try stuff that is a little less immediately-appealing, and there are a bunch of albums I have basically memorized now because of that.
With Spotify and YouTube Music, there's an infinite number of songs to choose from and as a result you never have the same excuse to listen to the same songs over and over again. I'm not necessarily saying it's "worse", just that I miss the way it used to be.
For discovering new music, I go to the flea market every so often and buy some random discs. Some are unlistenable, but a lot are alright. I found New Mind[1] this way and really loved it.
Also, many libraries still have CD collections. In the pre-iphone days I used to max out my library account getting CDs, rip/copy the ones I liked, and repeat.
It is a tad harder on a player without a [working] soft-lower mechanism, but still 100% doable as track boundaries are clearly visible on the surface of the vinyl.
For the same reason (plus curiosity of what people are listening to in weird places) I recently switched to Radio Garden [0], highly recommend it (not affiliated)
We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out a narrative between two things following each other. It needs time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day.
I made a TikTok account to at least know what people were talking about. After 3 months, I got it.
And I deleted it.
I felt noticeably worse when using it, in a way that nothing bad for me, including the news, refined sugar and pron, ever made me feel. The destruction was more intense, more structural. I could feel it gnarling.
In a way, such fast feedback is good, because it makes it easy to stop, while I'm still eating tons of refined sugar.
I suspect that the rapid-fire progression of one one-minute video after another does something similar, and is also equally bad for you.
I used to think doomscrolling broke my brain before I was diagnosed. Later I realized I was "doomscrolling" way before I got my first digital device, rereading the same fiction books late into the night.
I can buy the argument that rapid-form media consumption acutely creates symptoms like ADHD (for at most a few hours after exposure) because I see it even in NT people.
The idea you can gain any kind of actual experience/knowledge about a thing through a series of 30s clips that are competing with millions of other 30s clips to grab you is folly.
I have experience and teachers so I'm not solely relying on these videos. I use the short videos as a fast discovery of what's out there and I'll sometimes watch long videos afterward. LLM sites also work well for this discovery and I use that sometimes but it is a bit more work from me (which sounds strange to write re: AI) because I have to type out what I want instead of relying on algorithms that use data collected about me.
I use Facebook Reels (rather thank TikTok) which show me stuff anyway after I click on a link shared by friends so having it show me things relevant to learning seems like the best option here in case I click on next video.
It's not very effective at doing anything but making lowbrow content slightly more appealing.
Here's a guy who rigged a theremin and a hurdy gurdy up to Singer sewing machine and performs spectacular covers on it https://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/751772710192...
And here's someone living my dream, he moved to the Scottish Highlands to start a workshop creating mechanical sculptures inspired by my childhood heroes the Cabaret Mechanical Theater and he just made a piece for them! https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...
I don't want "weird and fun" anymore, and neither does everyone else who avoids TikTok.
This is classic equivocation fallacy.
What are the multiple meanings to the same phrase? Presumably "weird and fun" is what you're calling out? But to me their post looks like it's using the exact same meaning both times.
Yes, you figured it out, so apparently I didn't need an "actual explanation".
> looks like it's using the exact same meaning both times.
That's a fascinating equivalence operator you're using.
Because we can rewrite the second sentence with a pronoun so you're only parsing "weird and fun" once: "It's all on tiktok!" or to get over the top pedantic in removing any possibility of a double meaning: "The exact thing they say is lacking in quantity is still there on tiktok in full quantity."
Those both sound like basically the same as the original to me and they clearly don't have an equivocation fallacy on the phrase "weird and fun".
You could complain that putting so much on tiktok rather than other sites ruins the distribution, or something like that. But that's not the equivocation fallacy you're accusing them of.
Before TikTok, the YouTube "hook" was to choose the right image thumbnail that would entice people to click on your video. There was a time when YouTube didn't let you select a thumbnail; they would automatically select an image from a certain time in the video, so producers adapted by filming their videos so the most visually engaging moment came at that time.
Then I understood why. The automatic thumbnail generator had picked a frame from the exact middle of the two-minute video. It showed a close-up of a newborn heel prick test: a nurse firmly holding the baby’s heel and pricking it to collect a drop of blood for routine postnatal genetic screening. The thumbnail frame looked like a skin-colored cylinder grasped by a woman’s hand.
Thankfully, the flood of comments, expressing disgust and horror at a medical procedure on a newborn after viewers had expected something entirely different, did not prevent the algorithm from enthusiastically recommending that thumbnail to a significant fraction of humanity.
On its own, this is interesting. But when you consider that people actually need attention for things like their jobs, the road, their children, &c... it starts to sort of look a bit like a superweapon.
That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing. They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir content is and then their entire personality and content becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what they do to try to escape it it's impossible since they don't control their content exposure newcommers will aways be flooded in a repeat storm of that same hook, and people who get tired will move on no matter what. So the only reliable way of trying to "pivot" to anything else is to create a new account, but that's going to get you back at the start with no guarentee that you'll have another hit in the next 2 years, so they just accept their fate as "the cucumber guy" or "the funny outfit girl" and then ride that as far towards the sunset as possible.
He's just a blue-collar type guy who is mildly funny when critiquing the stupidity of, say, a guy walking up a badly placed ladder with a mini split condenser on his shoulder - but it's a niche that for whatever reason I enjoy, and I don't think I'd remember his handle if it wasn't for his very specific niche.
Interestingly enough [2] I've noticed a number of other creators seem to have sprung up in this niche and will occasionally find a video of some other blue-collar-lookin-dude doing the same schtick. I doubt FunkFPV is the first (in fact he sort of reminds me of an "AvE-lite") to tap this weird market, but he's my touchpoint, at least.
[1]: Yes, it is embarrassing that the algorithm has determined that these are likely to garner my attention
[2]: it's actually not really interesting because almost nothing on the topic of short-form video is actually interesting by any reasonable definition of that word, so this is just a turn of phrase
idk can't tell if this is me hoping or coping
Biology tends to disagree.
Hmm. I feel exact opposite. Most of successful channels that i see are using exact same formula/structure/often even style time and time again.
Isn't that the most followed user on TikTok Khaby Lame (his facial expression)? Looks like he just sold his company for $900M.
I think it's different for tiktok (as a non-tiktok user so take this with a huge grain of salt lmao), people don't watch one creator's videos one after the other, they get put in the big soup of clips that people scroll through for sometimes hours a day. And a lot of that is people sticking to one formula, because for many, the predictability is comforting / puts them in the tiktok brain off frame of mind.
Which isn't a new phenomenon - lots of people have "comfort shows" on e.g. Netflix, often the studio series with long seasons like sitcoms. They're comfortable because they often maintain a similar energy or formula over their run time, and missing parts of it (like current-day episodic films) isn't a big issue.
As for tiktok / other short video clip format content, one trend I've seen is to start the video with the conclusion (e.g. someone falling over), then starting with the buildup. Since these videos are played on loop anyway, they trick the viewer into thinking they missed the buildup.
I was looking into making an automatic detector for this kind of thing (basically detect if anything in the first ~30 seconds repeats itself later in the video, and if so mark it) but my DSP skills aren't up to the task (and turns out LLMs are useless for these kinds of novel tasks).
It would probably need to download the whole video first though, so I'm not sure it would work as an extension. And analysing all frames would be expensive upfront. (If you're using it interactively and waiting for a video to start playing.)
You might be able to get away with just looking for repetition in the audio.
LLMs failed to produce any kind of performant solution.
And other things like HN can definitely hook my mind.
Is that true?
I would be interested in a study on how long popular accounts do use their one hook -- or set of hooks, or rotate them...
You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts.
This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.