Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about. Today, I know what Spotify is trying to push, but I have no idea if that is what is actually popular. Even if I were to install TikTok I probably wouldn't see the same things they are. I have no idea if the garbage on the front page of reddit is really reflective of how younger people think, or if it just an engagement algorithm feedback loop gone wrong where everyone reasonable has long since checked out.<p>I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.<p>I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.
> The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet?<p>This is <i>exactly</i> it.<p>Consider a scenario that's likely fairly common given experiments I've done in the last several years. Say a site people still use to talk to/keep in touch with friends sometimes like IG/FB decides a user is "toxic" and either shadowbans them, or starts hiding their posts from friends. Maybe it isn't even because of a bad interaction, maybe the algorithm just decided their "content" wasn't suitable to be towards the top of this user's followers' feeds.<p>What would that look like to this user? It'd look like their friends were ignoring them, weren't interested in them, etc., possibly leading to depression (which has been proven pretty undeniably that high levels of social media use in teens results in higher levels of anxiety and depression).<p>The fact that people en masse are not pointing out how ridiculous this is, that a social media site can have such enormous influence on one's perception of "reality" is staggering and it should die and die quickly.
Regarding "Is that trend really viral?", I also think some people have stopped assigning value to things that go viral. It's not just a question of whether or not something went viral, but whether or not I should care even if it did.<p>People are starting to understand that engagement for the sake of it isn't necessarily desirable. The virality of something doesn't indicate its importance, just that it went viral. In some cases, it's a negative signal.<p>Over the last 1.5 years, I've intentionally reduced my interaction with social media significantly. I've become less and less aware of the viral trends of the week. I've stopped going to most of the content aggregators (HN is one of the last holdouts), and I've spent more time reading books and doing things in person.<p>My life is much better for it, and as someone who found tremendous value in Internet communities and credit them for helping me navigate a tumultuous childhood in the 90s, it now feels like the time to leave it mostly behind.<p>Not just because the Internet has changed, but because it is changing the people who use it. For all the good in the beginning, it was changing me in ways that I did not like. I was becoming more reactionary, less tolerant, and more pessimistic about other humans.<p>It seems to me that we're just not mentally equipped (or at least I'm not) to handle the Internet in its current form in the long run. It's fine for awhile, but degrades rapidly. I hope the next generation of web technology and communities will find ways to solve this, but I'm starting to think that part of the solution is to stop using it for the important stuff.<p>It turns out to be very possible, and very pleasant.
> "Consider TikTok....Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East....Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend....Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips...aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man."<p>so the normies finally won.<p>i think it makes sense that virality now is totally controlled by algorithms. there's revenues to be made. such a thing can't be left to chance, that was a blip of early internet history.<p>to me its all become boring, too much content and all of it seems the same, bland and unoriginal. i know there's good stuff but it's not easy to find among the noise.
> Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to be blissfully unaware of things that other people are consuming.<p>I've long been trying to communicate this trend to anyone who will listen, once needs are saturated the trend becomes building specialization that produces the most hedonism/value for the individual (per unit of inputs). Taken to the limit the outcome is a product perfectly attuned to your feel good chemical receptors in your body and brain.<p>Given a download of your brain, the future looks like generated content that is attuned to you alone, and is suboptimal for everyone else (relative to their own generated content). There will be a minor amount of novelty added to stimulate those circuits (and check the gradient for optima), but will mostly be a remix of what you already respond to.<p>So instead of Nike choosing to produce 10, err 100, colors of shoes, they will simply make exactly the color you want, just for you (and whoever collides).<p>Part of this will be an explosion in creativity because as an individual you will be able to express what you want and create it without the years/decades of training required to learn Script writing, or film, or the guitar, or how to sew etc.<p>Will it be good for us or society? That's a moral argument I'm not making here. Just an observation and extrapolation of what seems to be happening.
For the last ~7 years or so for me, the Internet has been specialty, curated online communities like Hacker News, Pinkbike, 68kMLA, /r/DestinyTheGame, and AudioScienceReview. It’s been absolutely great. It’s the real intersection of my real life & interests with a broader group of people than my local environment would otherwise enable.<p>I don’t participate in much social media. Facebook’s entire purpose to me is classified ads for furniture and bike parts. Instagram exists purely as an augmentation to Pinterest. Both of which exist simply to keep me and my partner from arguing endlessly about entirely imaginary design & decorating details. I don’t get the appeal of TikTok, and Twitter is mostly a place to make #dadjokes that I don’t want to subject my actual family to.<p>There was no positive value in being too online and participating in platforms and venues of the be all things to everybody variety.
The peak of this, for me, was <i>pizza rat</i> (late 2015) which felt like the last time everyone on the internet had seen the same thing. Kind of like the old days of TV where the whole nation would watch the same episode of something in the same evening.<p><i>Dat boi</i> (early 2016) was the first time I missed out on the meme zeitgeist and it’s been slipping further from my grasp ever since.<p>I suspect I am also getting old.
Note that this is the exact opposite thesis of this article[1], which I remember seeing on HN a while ago. Rather than having no counterculture, it seems the mainstream is being eaten by a thousand countercultures.<p>We now have maybe millions of content creators jostling for views, rather than three letter TV stations showing the same templates shows. What gets you an audience isn’t uniformity, but being different in an interesting way.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...</a>
What is happening online ? Easy answer: everything. The online world is now just as complex, both globalized and fragmented at the same time in different dimensions, as humanity itself... The tools of our social interactions, public and private, can only be homomorphic to them.
The article says we probably haven't heard of the most popular show on netflix (and I hadn't), but it's important to note that they're defining "popularity" as the show most often viewed, and not by how much people enjoyed the content.<p>Reviews for the show (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Agent" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Agent</a>) suggest that it's mediocre and forgettable. You've very likely heard of, and watched, the most popular shows on netflix when defined as the shows most people consider to be the best on the platform.<p>As long as I'm able to find out about the good shows on netflix, it really doesn't matter to me if some random netflix original disappointed more people within a specific time span.
Maybe the Internet is becoming the place where good ideas used to thrive and now is where good ideas die. If some info is worth keeping or reading, it belongs in a private network where access implies accountability.
I think we never knew. There was just an illsuion of knowing with trending tags and such. You could maybe know what some subset of people were doing in a particular community. But there are just so many communities, platforms, and languages out there. We never had, and still don’t have, the capability to know.
Viral is entirely useless as indicator anyway given since platforms are known to not just use organic signals. They put their finger on the scale for advertisers etc. e.g.<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tik...</a>
There’s an awesome recent Film Theory episode called „How YouTube broke your brain” that covers a very similar topic that I highly recommend watching: <a href="https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared</a>
I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in, to see what YouTube is pushing to the unidentified. It's just like TV used to be, aimed at a pretty low target. And that's nearly all American TV had. At least YouTube still has a longer tail of genuinely good work.
i feel like this is simply due to the increasing ubiquity of the internet, such that it isn't "the internet" any more but a bunch of people doing a bunch of things, some of which happen to use the internet. replace "online" with "in the world" and the absurdity of trying to keep up with it all as though it's a single entity becomes more obvious.
> Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web.<p>Relevant: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory</a><p>> The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity.[1][2][3][4] Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers.[5]<p>This is not a new thing. SEO types have been running 'spinner' tools for a long time. A spinner is a tool/technique to make copied content look fresh and new, and non-verbatim. Then we have the advent of LLMs which I have no doubt is being leveraged right now to spam the web with synthetic content.
I'll tell you what this actually is: the overclass has lost the ability to <i>determine</i> what is popular. It was always forced on us by whoever could pay the most and get a bit lucky. Now we have something resembling a democracy where people have some input of their own.<p>> “One reason why there’s so much consternation is that if you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t rig the game anymore,” he said.<p>Exactly. This is part of it, but the other part is that it's become extremely expensive to rig the game on a regular basis because of how fragmented and distributed everything is.
> The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate<p>I can't remember where I read it, but something I read made the claim that this is the reason why TV and Hollywood seem to be stuck in a cycle of remakes, spin offs, and extending already loved franchises for the last 5 or so years. The fact that there is no longer a monoculture means it's harder and harder to guess what media will be popular across a broad spectrum of people. You can make small budget things for a single niche, but it doesn't make sense to spend $100 million on a niche movie. It's riskier than ever to do something novel because our culture is so fragmented, so they're falling back on things that succeeded when we did have more of a monoculture, since they know that has broad appeal (or at least it did at one point).
Similar thoughts were shared by Alving Toffler in his excellent book, "Future Shock".<p>What happens to the human monkey-brain when the rate of technological achievements happen faster and faster?<p>I am at the airport writing this, on my way home. Everyone who's here alone is on their phone(except me - I'm on my laptop).<p>A question to you, who is a bit older than me. What did you do when you were alone but in a social setting? Like an airport bar?
> Popularity and virality aren’t the only metrics to determine what’s important, but without an understanding of what is happening online, we’re much more likely to let others take advantage of us or to waste precious time thinking about, debunking, and debating issues and controversies that are actually insignificant or have little impact on the world around us.<p>Believe that something trending is significant? Fake News because it is overblown and was only chuckled at for five seconds by two million people—most of whom housewives in New England—and then promptly forgotten. <i>Don’t</i> believe that something trending is significant? Same deal.<p>The “people are saying” headlines are already a thing. The ones where you find out that it’s three tweets with a cumulative like (or retweets? idk) of 57. Of course now they can justify them since it might be hundreds of thousands.<p>> A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable monoculture may feel, especially to those who’ve been continuously plugged into trending topics and viral culture, like a relief. But this new era of the internet is also one that entrenches tech giants and any forthcoming emergent platforms as the sole gatekeepers when it comes to tracking the way that information travels. We already know them to be unreliable narrators and poor stewards, but on a fragmented internet, where recommendation algorithms beat out the older follower model, we rely on these corporations to give us a sense of scale. This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.<p>No self-aware closing joke about how a media writer pines for a time when they had a clear role as a meta-commentator? Ugh, too sincere.
Is anybody else working on alternative social media algorithms?<p>I'm part of a small group who does. We would like to get in touch with others.<p>Or current approach: <a href="https://social-protocols.org/social-network/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://social-protocols.org/social-network/</a>
In cosmology, "horizon isolation" refers to the phenomenon where regions of the universe are completely cut off from each other due to the expansion of the universe exceeding the speed of light, preventing any exchange of information or causal interaction.
Frankly I just don't care anymore what is 'the thing' online these days.<p>I left the whole Facebook ecosystem years ago, Twitter last year, never used Reddit nor TikTok.<p>The amount of time and cpu cycles I can rather put towards my own interests and going deep on them, rather than chasing what the mass is interested in, is quite big.<p>Sure, at times I will sound like the guy who has been living in a forest and doesn't know about the latest happening trends.
But most of the time I have deeper and better researched knowledge on the subject matters that are always relevant (rather than the fleeting trends of social media).
For me trying to find out "what's happening online" has been like trying to drink the ocean -- always. "Online" was a big place, even in the 90s, and it's even bigger now. I go to a news site and there's an article about something that "went viral" and I missed it. I go into Target and there are toys based on Really Famous YouTuber that I've never heard of despite spending a lot of time on YouTube.<p>I don't know "what's going on online" and I probably never have. I only know what's happening in the little corners I visit. I think I like it better that way.
The paywall on the article is ironic since the collapse of free reputable news is likely another aspect of that.<p>I keep hoping the Fediverse will win. After what's happened to Twitter and Reddit and Facebook, it seems self-evident that our main means of public discourse needs to be something decentralized.<p>But the Fediverse is struggling. UX is a disaster, every instance admin is holding on by their fingernails to stay solvent and sane, product development is comparatively slow, and bad actors have only barely gotten started attacking them.
Social networks definitely created that bubble where what you experience is different than your neighbor. What seems to be trendy is just for you and your related peers, but not for everyone (which can further increase extremist thinking).<p>The difference with the old web is (was) that it consisted mostly of blogs - public pages - available to everyone, in a way that if a piece became trendy, it would be for a broader set of people.<p>I miss that.
What’s interesting is going from cultural scarcity to the cultural abundance of the internet has led to silos. But this time on subcultural lines instead of geography.
Perhaps the problem is that most of the “news” on the Internet is now behind a paywall. Audience fragmentation is the inevitable result of steady audience segmentation. What we are looking at is the inevitable result of incredible amounts of monetization effort, which inevitably empties the commons so that audiences can be properly extracted.<p>This very article <i>about the phenomenon is unreadable by the majorly of Earth</i> because it’s behind a paywall.
I'm going to get this quote wrong, but there was an author (Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov? one of those folks) who said something along the lines of "<i>We were lucky to be the last generation to be able to read all science fiction that was published. But considering that 80% of what is written is garbage, perhaps we weren't so lucky</i>"
I’ve certainly been noticing this recently, the problem I have with it is that it’s hard to get a frame of reference.<p>I get offered content on X and I don’t get where it’s coming from or why and I’m not sure if it’s actually something I should be concerned about. It’s all gotten a bit “weird” if you ask me.
Don't worry guys, I teach 8th grade. You're not missing much.<p>A student recently introduced me to BLP Kosher. That was... an experience.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/xUqDb-p-Ksw?si=kOLnSXlXgfc6wad_" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/xUqDb-p-Ksw?si=kOLnSXlXgfc6wad_</a>
from the society point of view, not have a shared cultural experience is bad. I remember the time, where we used to watch the same tv shows and, get the same news, and we collectively experienced and discussed it. It is maybe one of the backbones of a society culture. Today because everyone is consuming your own media, news, you have small opportunities to shared cultural experiences, one of them being sports (Soccer World championship, for instance), or going to Kindergarten/School/Army. Work used to be a place where we could somehow have this experience, but with introduction of remote work, for those remote, it was one step away from that..
from the article:<p>Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers (...) Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, (...) “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows - legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.<p>That was my feel <i>exactly</i>. How is it possible that I'm even on the same platform and have never even heard of it?
The author sounds out of touch. It has always been chaos, and whether something was viral has always been a curated reality. Throwing "AI" into an old narrative does not make it new and interesting. The internet has always been a twist on a gossipy book club, it's just that it has become so big it's not recognizable as such.<p>In comparison, those holding the most data know more than ever. That is how they built the AI tools to begin with. And in the chaos they will dictate what we get out of the internet.
I can't tell if this article and its title are satire or not. "Nobody" implies that there was, for a period, a group of "Somebodies" who did, in fact, know what was "happening online". That entire premise is the entire problem with the tweets-as-news culture and obviously false becuase "online" is a HUGE PLACE.<p>There appears to be a resignation that the "news" will now print whatever tiktok puts in front of them(!) and a cynical confession that drumming up clicks for random nonsense was, actually, the previous strategy.<p>Those of us who never took it seriously can't wait for it to keep unraveling.
There is one horrible typo in this article. It should read ‘TikTok’s opaque “Fork You” recommendation system’. It’s as if someone believes TikTok isn’t the Chinese militaries way of winning the war by melting hearts and minds .
And some part of this is intentional, such as:<p>- paywalls like in this website<p>- e-commerce searches (i.e. amazon) increasingly omitting some brands and some other filters<p>- google, youtube, facebook (i.e. events) searches being crippled<p>The knowledge is being limited for the sake of advertisers and marketing
><i>the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk</i><p>Huh? X traffic is up 22% year over year:<p><a href="https://x.com/xDaily/status/1736737544597840353?s=20" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://x.com/xDaily/status/1736737544597840353?s=20</a>
Legacy corporate media outfit bemoans loss of organized narrative control due to rise of uncontrolled unmonitored information sources, fears future without panoptic observation of popular opinion trends:<p>> "This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify."<p>Suggested reading:
> "The detailed and engrossing 2008 book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford investigates the CIA’s ideological struggle from 1947 to 1967 to win “hearts and minds” for US capitalism and to prosecute the Cold War."<p>That effort to control the media narratives being fed to the American public did not end in 1967 of course, it's alive and well today (although the organizations responsible are more nebulous, ranging from government bureaucracies to non-profit foundations to corporate ownership umbrellas).<p>It's true that the siloing of information due to the self-reinforcing effects of social media optimization algorithms (related to the desire to generate captive audiences for targeted advertising) is a problem, but having multiple independent social media accounts devoted to different topics is one way around it.