I liked most of this article and found it interesting. Maybe a bit long-winded, but like many people I've been thinking a lot about the same topic in recent years, struggling to break free of a certain mindset. Hearing the images and language how someone else feels when they describe that "machine" that keeps them captive is interesting -- a very "blind men and the elephant" experience. The cargo cult aspect is a new connection to me and something I'll think about more.
That said, like many tech critiques, I found the conclusion underwhelming. In particular, the idea that how we manage our "upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets" is important strikes me as foolish. These are the master's tools and they won't unmake the master's house. Sites like reddit and twitter have long put their thumbs on the scale to rewrite these metrics. Plus, just like with democracy, institutions and norms that encourage uninformed frivolous voting will drown out the meaningful signal. Not to say these forms of engagement are all bad, but they aren't a solution in and of themselves.
The real commodity to regulate is attention, of which "upvotes" are only a simulacrum. It should never be forgotten that this means often means disengaging from certain sites and systems entirely.
edit: on the note of attention being the real metric -- another thing I thought the author could have done well drawing attention to is the trend of watching/listening at 2x speed. It increases our tolerance for drawn out drivel. Maybe an alternative would be to shun media that we don't think would be worth playing 2x times at normal speed.
> We favor videos that either are very short or don’t require dedicated focus, confident in the knowledge that we can move on to something else whenever we want to. We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful
The rise of long form YouTube videos and Podcasts directly contradicts this. Summoning Salt, Technology Connections, and the dozens of other small documentary channels. Heck Matholger is able to regularly hit 500k+ views with 30min+ math videos![1]
True crime podcasts and history podcasts are also in direct opposition to the idea that we only consume short form content.
Then there is the entire rise of Medium and Substack. 10 years ago if I wanted long form journalism it was either The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or some tiny indie news magazines.
Now long form articles are more popular than ever.
I'll throw in Cathode Ray Dude [0] in there. It's hard to believe he will get 500K view on a 70 minutes video about some weird 90s hardware but he does.
Given the topics on that channel I would guess most viewers are already older people who got struck with nostalgia (a typical phenomenon in elder people).
Gen Z and younger on the other hand seems to have in large parts just an attention span of a few seconds left. At least that's my personal experience. (I don't want to annoy anybody here, there are exceptions of course!)
What's your time frame on "long form articles are more popular than ever"?
And are you using relative or absolute popularity? E.g. "medium form" articles in pop magazines were probably always more popular than longform ones in literary mags, but were they more relatively popular than "tweets" or "tiktok videos"?
Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today? And that number has a lower total population size to pull from! For a focused experience without your phone, or work, or anything else (compared to listening to a podcast in the background while working or driving)?
There are groups that still enjoy, or are learning to enjoy, longer stuff still. But that's not the dominant trend.
> Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today?
Avatar, Way Of The Water, a 3 hour movie, broke all sorts of sales records (though # of tickets sold data apparently isn't out yet).
Heck Avengers End Game was 3 hours long and it sold 351 million tickets.
I do think you get less of the repeat sales now days vs even in the 90s, just because there are so many more movies coming out, both in Cinema and on streaming platforms, but that doesn't say anything about people's willingness to attend long movies.
>Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today?
No, partly because the media landscape is much more fragmented with much more choice and partly because streaming services are now the natural destination for serious long-form drama. If you were a screenwriter pitching Doctor Zhivago today, you'd pitch it to Netflix. Nobody goes to the movies to watch a historical epic today, but nobody in the 1960s was binge-watching subtitled foreign drama on TV.
The author appears to have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the so-called "cargo cults" in the pacific. Our best understanding is that these cults amounted to scams conducted on a vulnerable population by their own leaders - leaders who had suffered irreparable damage to their ability to control the local economy when the US army briefly thrust their culture into post-scarcity.
The infinite scroll of mindless content generated by the big social networks is also about creating (a shallow facsimile of) post-scarcity. An endless stream of hobbies and lifestyles that could be yours - much like late night TV offered your parents the same promises for the low, low price of $14.95 excl. shipping and handling.
You can spot this in the way these companies constalty try and undermine the livelihoods of the content creators whose labour they rely on, or try and replace creators wholesale with AIs. If there was a genuine desire to push the social aspects of these systems, they'd be considerably more invested in creating a viable living for creators who participate in the system - instead these networks are just a tool for profit and power.
The imperative of profit maximization is the law of the land. It is also in the air and in baby milk. From there it enters your dreams and then it's like water to the fish.
>As unpleasant as it may be to admit, we are each individually to blame for this slump-inducing cycle’s persistence, and we are each responsible for halting it.
To some degree we are to blame, however this doesn't take into account the fact that there are armies of psychologists, marketers and developers and billions of dollars' worth of equipment at the other end of your feed. They aim specifically to get you to stay in the Skinner box so it's not exactly fair to say it's on us.
"There is a solution to all of this...When we scroll through our various feeds, we need to remain consciously aware of what we’re doing and what messages we’re silently sending.'
That's not likely to help. The author is asking for people to devote more attention to something trivial.
I think the operative word is "consciously". I think the author's wish is that we devote conscious thought, not merely emotional reaction, to whatever it is we're consuming. Not just what makes me feel good or bad; but rather, whether it is IMO good, or bad, or neither. If it's neither, move on; don't respond, reply, upvote, downvote, or anything else. Just move along. Let it atrophy and don't come back.
Hardly. I think the point is that you don't even have to play the game: the signals you send could be null as much as they could be something that you dedicate a lot of time and effort toward.
I like the sentiment but this could have been a tweet. If it was it wouldn't be preaching to the choir.
I am being glib above but in the spirit of useful feedback, the article needs editing for length. It's not that it's badly written, I just found that it took too circuitous a route to make its point.
I, for one, learned a new word: Ennui. And I believe I finally understand what people mean when referring to a cargo cult. A tweet most definitely would not have sufficed.
Thanks for the long read, interesting an well written.
(And: true, I'm probably living under a rock for being so ignorant) :-)
Because of the curse of the autodidact, do note that "ennui" is pronounced "on-wee," as it comes from French ("ennui" is "boredom" in French). It is not, as I found out rather embarrassingly, "en-you-eye".
Incidentally, I agree with you. While there could be some editing for length (oh well), the point was well made with a great example to start out with, and a bit of a discussion about some of the effects of being trapped in the Ennui Engine. It definitely hit on something I've noticed about myself.
I have a pile of books I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten to. I have lots of articles that I'd like to read but haven't made time yet. But I'd pull up Reddit and just scroll there. I deleted Twitter when Elon bought it and decided to burn it to the ground, and I'll be deleting Reddit now. Not so much to make a stand, but really just using this opportunity of upheaval as a way for my old head to extricate itself from the Ennui Engine.
Everyone learns these things from different places! I used to get annoyed at content explaining things I already knew well until I realized that I once learned it from somewhere that wasn't the "original place". I forget who said it, but someone said good writing isn't about writing something new, it's about saying existing truths in interesting ways. This piece didn't really land for me, but glad it did for you.
> If it was it wouldn't be preaching to the choir.
I'm not so sure it is. I think the target audience here are people who have already been desiring to break the cycle and might be currently more receptive to long-form content. A lot of people I know have been expressing the feeling this talks about lately, mostly due to the impending downfall of Reddit (how many people have said something along the lines of "i'm glad it's going away, that's one less thing to mindlessly scroll")
Maybe not quite a tweet, but certainly editing it down to 25%-35% of the original length would have resulted in a much higher quality article.
Which gets to the main point that he only grazed but didn't hit, and of which this article is a fine example. There is a resistance to engaging in longer-form works for exactly the same reason he derides the short form (tweets, spouts, TikTok vids, etc.) — there is no guarantee that the quality will be there, and it is a larger investment of time & effort to consume the long-form content, so the potential waste & disappointment will be greater. It's a worse risk/reward ratio than reading a tweet.
Yet, his underlying advice — to be conscious of what you consume and whether it ACTUALLY SATISFIES your needs — is valid, important, and actionable.
I've found that one of the keys is information density. It needs to be at a certain level to be worthwhile (and that level is different for different purposes). For example, I found some 20 years ago that almost all content on cable TV was far too dilute, so I cut the cord. I found that a default Twitter feed has a similarly high trash/value ratio, but this could be fixed by using carefully curated lists of high-value feeds to get high-density info much earlier (this has significantly degraded since Nov-22, I'm finding other better options such as Spoutible).
It does take conscious effort to maintain our entertainment and information feeds to be sure they actually meet OUR needs, but it is worth it.
I, on the other hand, enjoyed a well written piece. It's both and argument and a narration, which sets about the right mood for a critique of narratives. (Also, there seems to be a tactical side to this: as we enjoy the story, spend time over and with this, as we invest energy, we also align with the piece… much like we identify with a protagonist, by the perspective of whom we reconstruct the diegetic world of a novel or a movie.)
I disagree, while liking the tone of the piece and the style of the writer.
However, the appropriate length that the original commenter refers to is, in fact, a tweet.
The reason is simple: the SOTA in internet criticism is quite old whether you read Neil Postman, Mitch Kapor, Sherry Turkle, or David Courtwright. The Turkle and Courtwright quotes are easy to find being more recent. The Kapor quote from the EFF dates to 1993 and so Google et al have found a way to lose it, and if you can find it, you may not be able to read it.
> Our upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets need to be reserved for only those things which truly deserve to be amplified, not just because we personally appreciate them, but because they’re of exceptional quality.
Sounds great, but with all the morons reacting prolifically to every piece of trash, will my one carefully allotted upvote be valued?
When I looked at their example poll - what was interesting was I started to think tactically - as votes now cost - I'm much more interested in not wasting votes on issues that aren't going to be closely fought.
ie Even if I had strong feelings about topic X - should I vote if I already can guess the outcome of the vote - surely smarter to avoid wasting that vote and focus on something that's likely to be closely contested?
So you end up with a secondary market in information about how the vote is or is likely to go.
Ideally, as a user, what I'd like is the ability see the existing state of all the polls, and be able to dynamically adjust my vote based on the current voting state.
If the platform doesn't do that - then any differential in information about how the votes might go creates an unfair voting dynamic - ie the voting outcome isn't just about how much you care.....
If you map that back to say hackernews threads and voting - would people hold off voting, hoping somebody else spends their vote first - leading to less interaction.
In the end - isn't the quality of votes simply a reflection of the quality of the electorate?
Strong +1 (squared) to the quadratic voting suggestion. But I don’t think that it could be implemented in any sizable existing community, it is just too abstract of a benefit.
But the discussion around SMOL Webb communities, feels applicable here, the type of person that would get excited about a quadratic coding community is self selected to think more deeply and abstractly in the first place. Plenty of these people exist, but there has not been a Schelling point for them. (definitely correct me if I’m wrong on that!)
What does one do with unallocated credits? Would they be banked for future votes or lost?
In the case of social media, how are credits even allocated? If a simple daily model, that already feels bad. See something great in the morning, don't vote for it! You might see something better in the evening. Should be able to dip into negatives somehow for urgent, high importance matters.
I upvoted this one but wonder whether I did it because it cunningly convinced me to consume a long form content just to eat the pellet for the fact I read it to the end. I agree with many of the statements, always keep an eye out though for the potential I am just the old man who does not get the sophistication that goes into phenomenally only cheap, thoughtless content. What if the new art is not articulated in lighting but in the surprise out of the subtlety of the chain of simple contents. What if art is transitioning to a more directly dialectic between creators. I see my son working with a group on stickman animations, and I appreciate the community and its shared sense of newfound beauty in the pursuit of a perfection that I cannot fully understand.
Readit News
That said, like many tech critiques, I found the conclusion underwhelming. In particular, the idea that how we manage our "upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets" is important strikes me as foolish. These are the master's tools and they won't unmake the master's house. Sites like reddit and twitter have long put their thumbs on the scale to rewrite these metrics. Plus, just like with democracy, institutions and norms that encourage uninformed frivolous voting will drown out the meaningful signal. Not to say these forms of engagement are all bad, but they aren't a solution in and of themselves.
The real commodity to regulate is attention, of which "upvotes" are only a simulacrum. It should never be forgotten that this means often means disengaging from certain sites and systems entirely.
edit: on the note of attention being the real metric -- another thing I thought the author could have done well drawing attention to is the trend of watching/listening at 2x speed. It increases our tolerance for drawn out drivel. Maybe an alternative would be to shun media that we don't think would be worth playing 2x times at normal speed.
The rise of long form YouTube videos and Podcasts directly contradicts this. Summoning Salt, Technology Connections, and the dozens of other small documentary channels. Heck Matholger is able to regularly hit 500k+ views with 30min+ math videos![1]
True crime podcasts and history podcasts are also in direct opposition to the idea that we only consume short form content.
Then there is the entire rise of Medium and Substack. 10 years ago if I wanted long form journalism it was either The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or some tiny indie news magazines.
Now long form articles are more popular than ever.
Heck even movies are getting longer! [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Mathologer/videos [2] https://www.whattowatch.com/features/are-movies-really-getti...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude
Given the topics on that channel I would guess most viewers are already older people who got struck with nostalgia (a typical phenomenon in elder people).
Gen Z and younger on the other hand seems to have in large parts just an attention span of a few seconds left. At least that's my personal experience. (I don't want to annoy anybody here, there are exceptions of course!)
And are you using relative or absolute popularity? E.g. "medium form" articles in pop magazines were probably always more popular than longform ones in literary mags, but were they more relatively popular than "tweets" or "tiktok videos"?
Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today? And that number has a lower total population size to pull from! For a focused experience without your phone, or work, or anything else (compared to listening to a podcast in the background while working or driving)?
There are groups that still enjoy, or are learning to enjoy, longer stuff still. But that's not the dominant trend.
Avatar, Way Of The Water, a 3 hour movie, broke all sorts of sales records (though # of tickets sold data apparently isn't out yet).
Heck Avengers End Game was 3 hours long and it sold 351 million tickets.
I do think you get less of the repeat sales now days vs even in the 90s, just because there are so many more movies coming out, both in Cinema and on streaming platforms, but that doesn't say anything about people's willingness to attend long movies.
No, partly because the media landscape is much more fragmented with much more choice and partly because streaming services are now the natural destination for serious long-form drama. If you were a screenwriter pitching Doctor Zhivago today, you'd pitch it to Netflix. Nobody goes to the movies to watch a historical epic today, but nobody in the 1960s was binge-watching subtitled foreign drama on TV.
The infinite scroll of mindless content generated by the big social networks is also about creating (a shallow facsimile of) post-scarcity. An endless stream of hobbies and lifestyles that could be yours - much like late night TV offered your parents the same promises for the low, low price of $14.95 excl. shipping and handling.
You can spot this in the way these companies constalty try and undermine the livelihoods of the content creators whose labour they rely on, or try and replace creators wholesale with AIs. If there was a genuine desire to push the social aspects of these systems, they'd be considerably more invested in creating a viable living for creators who participate in the system - instead these networks are just a tool for profit and power.
To some degree we are to blame, however this doesn't take into account the fact that there are armies of psychologists, marketers and developers and billions of dollars' worth of equipment at the other end of your feed. They aim specifically to get you to stay in the Skinner box so it's not exactly fair to say it's on us.
That's not likely to help. The author is asking for people to devote more attention to something trivial.
I am being glib above but in the spirit of useful feedback, the article needs editing for length. It's not that it's badly written, I just found that it took too circuitous a route to make its point.
Thanks for the long read, interesting an well written.
(And: true, I'm probably living under a rock for being so ignorant) :-)
Incidentally, I agree with you. While there could be some editing for length (oh well), the point was well made with a great example to start out with, and a bit of a discussion about some of the effects of being trapped in the Ennui Engine. It definitely hit on something I've noticed about myself.
I have a pile of books I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten to. I have lots of articles that I'd like to read but haven't made time yet. But I'd pull up Reddit and just scroll there. I deleted Twitter when Elon bought it and decided to burn it to the ground, and I'll be deleting Reddit now. Not so much to make a stand, but really just using this opportunity of upheaval as a way for my old head to extricate itself from the Ennui Engine.
I'm not so sure it is. I think the target audience here are people who have already been desiring to break the cycle and might be currently more receptive to long-form content. A lot of people I know have been expressing the feeling this talks about lately, mostly due to the impending downfall of Reddit (how many people have said something along the lines of "i'm glad it's going away, that's one less thing to mindlessly scroll")
Maybe not quite a tweet, but certainly editing it down to 25%-35% of the original length would have resulted in a much higher quality article.
Which gets to the main point that he only grazed but didn't hit, and of which this article is a fine example. There is a resistance to engaging in longer-form works for exactly the same reason he derides the short form (tweets, spouts, TikTok vids, etc.) — there is no guarantee that the quality will be there, and it is a larger investment of time & effort to consume the long-form content, so the potential waste & disappointment will be greater. It's a worse risk/reward ratio than reading a tweet.
Yet, his underlying advice — to be conscious of what you consume and whether it ACTUALLY SATISFIES your needs — is valid, important, and actionable.
I've found that one of the keys is information density. It needs to be at a certain level to be worthwhile (and that level is different for different purposes). For example, I found some 20 years ago that almost all content on cable TV was far too dilute, so I cut the cord. I found that a default Twitter feed has a similarly high trash/value ratio, but this could be fixed by using carefully curated lists of high-value feeds to get high-density info much earlier (this has significantly degraded since Nov-22, I'm finding other better options such as Spoutible).
It does take conscious effort to maintain our entertainment and information feeds to be sure they actually meet OUR needs, but it is worth it.
(maybe that's the 1-tweet version?)
That's 30 to 45 seconds of reading time. Admittedly it could be shorter, but still, it's not excessive.
However, the appropriate length that the original commenter refers to is, in fact, a tweet.
The reason is simple: the SOTA in internet criticism is quite old whether you read Neil Postman, Mitch Kapor, Sherry Turkle, or David Courtwright. The Turkle and Courtwright quotes are easy to find being more recent. The Kapor quote from the EFF dates to 1993 and so Google et al have found a way to lose it, and if you can find it, you may not be able to read it.
Sounds great, but with all the morons reacting prolifically to every piece of trash, will my one carefully allotted upvote be valued?
I like the idea of Quadratic Voting: https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-v...
When I looked at their example poll - what was interesting was I started to think tactically - as votes now cost - I'm much more interested in not wasting votes on issues that aren't going to be closely fought.
ie Even if I had strong feelings about topic X - should I vote if I already can guess the outcome of the vote - surely smarter to avoid wasting that vote and focus on something that's likely to be closely contested?
So you end up with a secondary market in information about how the vote is or is likely to go.
Ideally, as a user, what I'd like is the ability see the existing state of all the polls, and be able to dynamically adjust my vote based on the current voting state.
If the platform doesn't do that - then any differential in information about how the votes might go creates an unfair voting dynamic - ie the voting outcome isn't just about how much you care.....
If you map that back to say hackernews threads and voting - would people hold off voting, hoping somebody else spends their vote first - leading to less interaction.
In the end - isn't the quality of votes simply a reflection of the quality of the electorate?
But the discussion around SMOL Webb communities, feels applicable here, the type of person that would get excited about a quadratic coding community is self selected to think more deeply and abstractly in the first place. Plenty of these people exist, but there has not been a Schelling point for them. (definitely correct me if I’m wrong on that!)
In the case of social media, how are credits even allocated? If a simple daily model, that already feels bad. See something great in the morning, don't vote for it! You might see something better in the evening. Should be able to dip into negatives somehow for urgent, high importance matters.
At least you aren't adding to the problem.