I really strongly recommend his book You Are Not A Gadget. He wrote it like fifteen years ago and it feels like he is describing last year. Like he's telling you about a lot of the problems of social media today, writing before Facebook had ads.
Why it is worth reading is his thinking about the causes and outcomes is so clear. Its still useful today.
> I think social media, in its current ad-infested, addiction-fueled data-harvesting form, is pure poison.
I'm in complete agreement, but I will say that this attitude has left me pretty isolated as I'm getting older. For better or worse, most people use Social Media to stay connected so I have wound up pretty connectionless over time.
I've been thinking about making a new Facebook account just to try and connect with local people playing TTRPGs, because that's apparently still where most of the organizing is. Unfortunately Facebook wants a fucking government ID now so I'm probably not going to do that
It's got to be said that rewarding people who make content on a regular, frequent schedule seems to A: be a way of coercing a fairly high minimum level of labour out of platformed accounts and B: a good way of flooding feeds with content which is largely devoid of novelty as a handful of prolific accounts dominate what people end up seeing.
You can see this happen in real time if you closely follow some youtube channels. You take someone who is genuinely talented and has some interesting, novel insights. And, maybe a couple of their videos makes it big. And they rightly think they should keep making videos because they have other insights. And they're not wrong.
But over time, something happens. No one has a novel, brilliant insight 1-2 times a week. So once they really turn in and decide to make a serious effort with their channel, the quality of their content suffers. Maybe it's not quite click-bait, but it's less genuine and more formulaic than their original work. A bit more sensational. Videos are reaching for reasons to exist, since the author needs to keep pumping them out.
I wouldn't quite call it corruption, but it's a clear degradation. In principle it's not a novel problem, since people have been writing weekly editorials for a long time. But, there seems to be something about the Youtube format that makes it such that the big channels must always play the game and pump out sub-par content.
The advice here is good, and I'm a big believer that the cream (e.g., sincerity and real opinions) rises to the top for writing. Still, think folks dunk on these types of writing automation tools too much when, for many, they can be a gateway drug to consistent posting and finding your online voice.
That is to say, the whole post is a bit of an internet old-head complaint. Reminds me of baby boomers complaining about a "decline" in homeownership and having children without acknowledging the massive shifts in the economic accessibility that support these milestones.
It's easy to write a post like this when you've already built a following because you started when social media was a greenfield experience. It's much harder when you have to compete for signal while being pressured to build a brand and perform at your day job.
The obsession with constant content production combined with algorithmic, feed driven consumption frontends with terrible discoverability and intense bubblification lead to today's screaming contest that ruins our sanity. On average I find it much worse than the old infosphere (TV+print) used to be, for producers and consumers. It's quite tragic, really.
Though I also notice awareness around this issue is rising (e.g. smartphone bans in school, initiatives like bluesky), which is good, I guess. All of this is still a society-wide experiment without control group.
Agreed. Discussions like these always remind me of some great research on how the destruction of the old, more averaged, and less targeted infosphere used to support significantly more political cohesion.
unclear how much its getting them ahead, but its certainly works at making their followers or whatever go up, just quickly going to my linkedin feed and looking for the first two painfully obvious auto generated posts, both of those people had 400+ connections.
I looked through the comments and the vast majority are also painfully obvious AI.
I know for me personally it would do the opposite, and if i saw someone i was following make a post similar, I would unfollow. Not like it matters on a site like linkedin though where they will just attempt to feed people the garbage regardless if they follow or not.
I amsure it was Jaron Lanier, in his book Who Owns The Future, who predicted the inevitable outcome of bots talking to bots on social media.
He said that in 2013, and now we're in 2026, not only is it possible, but it's very likely.
I am glad about it. I think social media, in its current ad-infested, addiction-fueled data-harvesting form, is pure poison.
I really strongly recommend his book You Are Not A Gadget. He wrote it like fifteen years ago and it feels like he is describing last year. Like he's telling you about a lot of the problems of social media today, writing before Facebook had ads.
Why it is worth reading is his thinking about the causes and outcomes is so clear. Its still useful today.
> I think social media, in its current ad-infested, addiction-fueled data-harvesting form, is pure poison.
I'm in complete agreement, but I will say that this attitude has left me pretty isolated as I'm getting older. For better or worse, most people use Social Media to stay connected so I have wound up pretty connectionless over time.
I've been thinking about making a new Facebook account just to try and connect with local people playing TTRPGs, because that's apparently still where most of the organizing is. Unfortunately Facebook wants a fucking government ID now so I'm probably not going to do that
It's got to be said that rewarding people who make content on a regular, frequent schedule seems to A: be a way of coercing a fairly high minimum level of labour out of platformed accounts and B: a good way of flooding feeds with content which is largely devoid of novelty as a handful of prolific accounts dominate what people end up seeing.
You can see this happen in real time if you closely follow some youtube channels. You take someone who is genuinely talented and has some interesting, novel insights. And, maybe a couple of their videos makes it big. And they rightly think they should keep making videos because they have other insights. And they're not wrong.
But over time, something happens. No one has a novel, brilliant insight 1-2 times a week. So once they really turn in and decide to make a serious effort with their channel, the quality of their content suffers. Maybe it's not quite click-bait, but it's less genuine and more formulaic than their original work. A bit more sensational. Videos are reaching for reasons to exist, since the author needs to keep pumping them out.
I wouldn't quite call it corruption, but it's a clear degradation. In principle it's not a novel problem, since people have been writing weekly editorials for a long time. But, there seems to be something about the Youtube format that makes it such that the big channels must always play the game and pump out sub-par content.
The advice here is good, and I'm a big believer that the cream (e.g., sincerity and real opinions) rises to the top for writing. Still, think folks dunk on these types of writing automation tools too much when, for many, they can be a gateway drug to consistent posting and finding your online voice.
That is to say, the whole post is a bit of an internet old-head complaint. Reminds me of baby boomers complaining about a "decline" in homeownership and having children without acknowledging the massive shifts in the economic accessibility that support these milestones.
It's easy to write a post like this when you've already built a following because you started when social media was a greenfield experience. It's much harder when you have to compete for signal while being pressured to build a brand and perform at your day job.
The obsession with constant content production combined with algorithmic, feed driven consumption frontends with terrible discoverability and intense bubblification lead to today's screaming contest that ruins our sanity. On average I find it much worse than the old infosphere (TV+print) used to be, for producers and consumers. It's quite tragic, really.
Though I also notice awareness around this issue is rising (e.g. smartphone bans in school, initiatives like bluesky), which is good, I guess. All of this is still a society-wide experiment without control group.
Agreed. Discussions like these always remind me of some great research on how the destruction of the old, more averaged, and less targeted infosphere used to support significantly more political cohesion.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/postbroadcast-democracy... - absolute banger
"Sincerity is the key to success. If you can fake it, you've got it made"
-- Groucho Marx (probably)
Now I'm wondering what a 'The Tao of Groucho' book would look like.
In the land of the insincere and dishonest, he of earnest character and inconveniently truthful speech is criminal.
Who are these influencers that are getting ahead by dolling out AI slop in their likeness?
unclear how much its getting them ahead, but its certainly works at making their followers or whatever go up, just quickly going to my linkedin feed and looking for the first two painfully obvious auto generated posts, both of those people had 400+ connections.
I looked through the comments and the vast majority are also painfully obvious AI.
I know for me personally it would do the opposite, and if i saw someone i was following make a post similar, I would unfollow. Not like it matters on a site like linkedin though where they will just attempt to feed people the garbage regardless if they follow or not.
The title is completely opposite to the content of the article.
Who's falling behind? What does falling behind even mean if the OP doesn't care about numbers and really doesn't want to play the social media game?
Social media as it existed is gone, because people got tired of it, just as they got tired of geocities and myspace before that.
The new iteration is really bad, and there's a good chance people will get tired of it just as quickly as they got over the older ones.
Meanwhile, let's try to ignore stupid people doing stupid things with AI as much as we can.