> you are rarely exposed to anything that isn’t releasing dopamine all the time and it means you’re rarely challenged
This makes me question whether you've tried to use TikTok for an extended period of time - say, 30 minutes a day for a month or so.
I liken it more to a skinner box. It will constantly show you low dopamine videos (+ ads) in between "hits" of content that are actually relevant to your interests to keep you hooked. You keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling past what is basically garbage to find the next "good" video. Sometimes you get many "good" videos in a row!
As far as not being challenged, I'm not sure about that. TikTok is always trying to learn more about you and your interests and hobbies and what videos keep you watching for longer. This means that it also frequently shows you videos outside of your "bubble" as a test to see if you're also interested in other topics. Over the past ~3 years, I have had a ton of engaging conversations with others and discovered SO MANY books, games, TV shows, movies, and hobbies because of what is basically an "everything recommendation engine". Most of the books I read this year (well over 100) were recommended by people on TikTok and were novels that I otherwise would have never even given a second glance.
I have very mixed feelings about TikTok. On one hand, it has led me to so many things I wouldn't have found otherwise (in a way that Reddit, HN, Bluesky, and other communities have failed). But it is also a depressing time suck that can get you to waste hours of your time on garbage and nonsense. Like most things in life, you get out what you put in.
“But it is also a depressing time suck that can get you to waste hours of your time on garbage and nonsense. Like most things in life, you get out what you put in.”
This is enough of a downside to say all the other positives are irrelevant. You could call this “brain rot” for the masses.
I don't think the medium of short form video is redeemable. Its occasional positives are the delivery vehicle for the many negatives, the sugar coating around the poison. It's rotten by just about any measure: properties of the medium, what types of business it attracts, messages that thrive, how well it reflects reality, aggregate effects on people across a variety of outcomes, the aftertaste of using it, etc.
I think the best question to assess it is does this make us better people or not, and to what degree? From what I have seen, the answer is it seems to be pretty significantly de-skilling us in attention, agency, nuance, psychological wellbeing, etc. It makes us more vulnerable to influence and manipulation. The businesses that benefit the most from deploying it are advertising-based, which naturally leads to surveillance and algorithms and pace of consumption that maximizes addiction. The messages that perform best are emotional and attention seeking. There is no information quality control. The consumption pattern it suggests leaves no room for thinking, processing emotion, or nuance.
The personal crusade I'm on is to build a competing product at the quality level of TikTok/Insta that diverts interest & attention toward books, which as a medium is both a lot more of a known quantity and whose consumption naturally results in longer attention spans, greater literacy, and all the nth order consequences of written culture. It's great that things like BookTok exist but ultimately that energy & activity needs to find its way over to a healthier home.
I agree that is is irredeemable. I'm excited for Oracle to take over because then TikTok will degrade to a point where I'm not compelled to use it anymore!
> build a competing product at the quality level of TikTok/Insta that diverts interest & attention toward books, which as a medium is both a lot more of a known quantity and whose consumption naturally results in longer attention spans, greater literacy, and all the nth order consequences of written culture
This sounds great in theory and has been tried a few times (see: Goodreads, Storygraph, Worm.so and a few others) but without the social aspect I think it is difficult to gain traction. A lot of my favorite books I've found by going to local bookstores and looking at the employee recommendations.
It makes sense, if I were trying to construct an algorithm to make sure I gave people their hits I would also have to push in things they hadn't shown any interest in or even actively disliked, considering that people get inputs from the reality around them outside my service and as such they may change their behaviors and inclinations, I would need a way to note that is the case and respond.
right, but I was commenting on why the idea that TikTok and other social media platforms will not challenge you is wrong, because even as poor a programmer as myself can see I would need to put some things in that challenge people so as to map and respond to changes in people's preferences over time.
Does all reading need to be challenging and mind expanding? A lot of the books were "just for fun" sci-fi/fantasy reads. A few of them were "mind-expanding". It's good to have a mix of the two.
I listen to audiobooks while I walk the dog, which at 4x 30min walks ends up being 120min/day. At 2x speed that alone is ~4 hours of progress per day. I also listen while cooking and cleaning which adds up to a _lot_ of time.
It doesn’t sound like you were challenged. The alg probing you with stuff it thinks you might like based on things people with similar interests liked it quite the opposite of challenging.
Filter bubbles have become so standardized that people have forgotten what being challenged is like.
Yes, I have an older gaming PC from ~2018 that I keep putting off upgrading (first GPU prices skyrocketed, now this...) and was hoping to replace it with a Steam Machine next year. Will be endlessly bummed if that doesn't happen.
Will also be interesting if Sony/Microsoft was planning on releasing a next-gen system anytime soon, and I wonder if this will affect Apple's hardware at all.
Right - you can NOT tell me that a sufficiently complex application using HTMX is easier to reason about than React. I've had to deal with a complex HTMX codebase and it is a nightmare.
Right - you can NOT tell me that a sufficiently simple application using React is easier to reason about than HTMX. I've had to deal with a simple React codebase and it is a nightmare.
Yeah… one of them addresses a market populated by hundreds of thousands of developers with extensive professional experience in the framework, and the other addresses a niche of Python developers who refused to learn JavaScript until somebody hid it from them and called it hypermedia.
100’s of thousands used to use php too :) most developers (roughly 97.56% are terrible/incompetent so going with the herd should tell you you are on the wrong train :)
Thousands of developers still use PHP… and even more users… Wordpress (43% of web), Facebook (billions of users), Wikipedia (billions of users)…. all PHP.
htmx is a a toy, mildly amusing to play with, built on an insecure foundation that bypasses basic browser security controls and hands a blob of JavaScript to a bunch of backend developers who can’t be bothered to learn it because they think they know better…
No serious project uses htmx and none ever will, because it becomes an unmaintainable mess by the third developer and second year of development.
“No serious project uses [insert any framework/language/…] and none ever will, because it becomes an unmaintainable mess by the third developer and second year of development” if team is incompetent
Mac hardware with *true* Linux support would be heaven. I really hope that Framework can keep improving and get to that level eventually (please Framework, release and ARM chip, please)
Unfortunately, most standards that we end up with are only standard because they're are widely used and not because they are the best or they make the most sense.
It's not even a standard. It's literally not doing anything here. Not only "can" you rip out MCP there is zero technical reason for any of those things to be an "MCP" in the first place.
I switched to Kagi a while back and ended up buying their annual subscription for unlimited searches. It's such a breath of fresh air, like a search engine from an alternate universe where Google just focused on search instead of adtech.
I'd love to do that, but I haven't seen any projects that have the polish and cohesive vision that I feel pro art / design tools should have. Apps like Inkscape and GIMP have always felt pretty rough around the edges and unpleasant to me, in a way that money won't help.
i would gladly pay $500 for GIMP if i felt their developers would prioritize features that i actually need out of an image manipulation program. they never have and by the looks of things, they never will. it's too bad.
I tried ;) GIMP developers aren't very open to external contributions. I don't consider my attempts to be of low quality either, but the bike shedding resulted in them never being accepted. "It's best to wait until X lands" or "I think this will be part of Y".
Meanwhile, 10 years later, the functional features I've tried to contribute are still not possible in GIMP ;)
Same here.. I don't use it often, but it is fairly quick on my M2. It did have some mouse focus issues, you have to click around a bit more but that's okay-ish.
This makes me question whether you've tried to use TikTok for an extended period of time - say, 30 minutes a day for a month or so.
I liken it more to a skinner box. It will constantly show you low dopamine videos (+ ads) in between "hits" of content that are actually relevant to your interests to keep you hooked. You keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling past what is basically garbage to find the next "good" video. Sometimes you get many "good" videos in a row!
As far as not being challenged, I'm not sure about that. TikTok is always trying to learn more about you and your interests and hobbies and what videos keep you watching for longer. This means that it also frequently shows you videos outside of your "bubble" as a test to see if you're also interested in other topics. Over the past ~3 years, I have had a ton of engaging conversations with others and discovered SO MANY books, games, TV shows, movies, and hobbies because of what is basically an "everything recommendation engine". Most of the books I read this year (well over 100) were recommended by people on TikTok and were novels that I otherwise would have never even given a second glance.
I have very mixed feelings about TikTok. On one hand, it has led me to so many things I wouldn't have found otherwise (in a way that Reddit, HN, Bluesky, and other communities have failed). But it is also a depressing time suck that can get you to waste hours of your time on garbage and nonsense. Like most things in life, you get out what you put in.
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