Let's get serious for a second here. You have to be a complete braindead zombie to find those videos entertaining. I can't believe anybody is wasting their time on these.
Tiktok is the worst of the brain-rotting social media products our world has produced, and that's saying a lot.
I spent many years in the early days of social media building: starting at StumbleUpon, working on early Facebook apps, building companies in the space. It always felt that social media was an unstoppable train, but it seems like the benefits of connecting everyone together outweighed the negatives: the constant address book spamming, content designed to be viral rather than informative, etc.
I suppose that's it's really just the distilled, pure dopamine lever part of all the early stuff we built with everything else stripped out. It was always inevitable that the culture of optimization would strip out the humanity, I suppose.
"If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are you’ve stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll one night this summer." I think this shows the TikTok algorithm makes things look more ubiquitous then they really are, I've never seen anything like this, and half the time when I mention what seems to me to be a big meme like demure and mindful to someone else i know whose on TikTok they'll have no idea what I'm talking about.
Absolutely, that's why I believe politics are the way they are right now, people see content that's more and more extreme of their preferred side and they believe that's the complete representation of the situation, the truth. This makes it hard to take someone else on the opposite side seriously, let alone have a conversation.
I think the big problem is that people use social media and other highly biased sources for important information (political, health, etc). In theory, school reports and experiments requiring citations are supposed to demonstrate the way to scrutinize and select sources of information. It seems that's mostly lost though.
In a lot of cases -- at least in every case I care about -- the opposite side is so different that it is indeed hard to have conversation with them. I don't think this is the result of an algorithm, I think the algorithm just reflects reality.
For example, I believe people should be able to use a doctor to get healthcare, and they believe the government should prevent that. There's no middle ground there, it's a boolean.
Is this meant to be ironic? The example given is a great example of the sort of extremist strawmanning meant to warp people's views to promote a boolean mindset on the issue.
No, not ironic. One side says the government should be involved in the decision (and may tell you that you can't get care). The other says it's up to you. There's no third option.
I know of no proposals that don't involve the government regulation of care. The government can mandate treatment just as they can ban treatments in any of the systems. There are a variety of proposed systems that display these properties to varying degrees.
The argument that social media is responsible for political polarization is reductive and ahistorical.
It ignores the thousands of years of division that we've had along ethnic and religious lines.
What we have now is simply the peak of a longstanding trend that's older than the United States: it's white supremacy. That's all it is. Anti-immigrant hysteria? White nativism and white chauvinism.
These things are manifesting now because of deteriorating material conditions and longstanding beliefs, not because of social media (eg [1]).
You contradict yourself very quickly. If we're at "the peak", how did we get there? Couldn't social media be a factor?
Moreover, the idea that white supremacy is at its peak right now is ridiculous and ahistorical in its own right. It's also massively disrespectful to those who lived through things like chattel slavery or the holocaust. To say that seeing some loudmouth spout off on Twitter is worse than either of those is pretty gross.
Case in point
If you like this article, it's written by Ryan Broderick the guy behind Garbage Day, a newsletter I can't recommend highly enough if you spend rather too much time online:
These people that posts these links is what makes HN extra good
Does anybody have a example video instead of thousands words because I quite can't imagine what is he talking about
The title of the article refers to this video. https://youtu.be/6PJxc2B0G0M I believe the YouTube channel is owned by the original creators.
https://youtu.be/BVY20VI259Y?feature=shared
They get repetitive quick
As someone who's watched tons of these videos, now I know!
I've always wanted to try the software, too bad the author never tracked it down.