The "customized feed for you" is not as unique as you'd expect. It basically is the algorithm fitting you into some number of buckets and then serving you that content.
In fact, the "customized feed for you" does one thing really well. It treats you exactly like it learned to treat someone "like you" from the past. So what it really does is regurgitate an old, stale, pattern. In some sense, it prevents you from finding new experiences, keeping society frozen in time, repeating the behavior sequences of those before them, the pioneers and trailblazers that define the relationships early.
The other thing algorithmic feeds, and even some sites like buzzfeed do, is generate strings of nonsense. This isnt quite a new phenomenon, but started in the 80s with MTV. "Whereas variety shows and televised concerts in the 1960s and 70s provided context and structure to the music they presented, MTV instead gave viewers a rapid succession of wildly different sounds and visual accompaniments to those sounds, without any logic connecting one video to another."
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used... Compare America's funniest home videos, with a host, callbacks, and even a basic narrative structure to tiktok. At least Tiktok accomplishes SOME of the culture missing from prior products on the market in the last decade by inviting people to remix videos with the same audio.
> So what it really does is regurgitate an old, stale, pattern. In some sense, it prevents you from finding new experiences, keeping society frozen in time, repeating the behavior sequences of those before them, the pioneers and trailblazers that define the relationships early.
The part about keeping society frozen in time is contradictory to the rest of the text.
It's leading people on to the extreme end, so a conspiracy theorist will become even more of one etc. A frozen society would be unchanging... But it does change as extreme ideas spread like never before.
Right, the brain seems to have a heuristic that if it hears/sees/etc the same thing, it makes it believe it more. Like if you’ve heard two different people spout the same wrong thing, you’re quite likely to start believing it. So if you’re fed the same thing over and over due to your YouTube persona bucket, you probably become a more devout believer, for better or worse. Receiving a smattering of different opinions probably keeps you in a better place in terms of remaining critical. Maybe staying in a skeptical frame of mind helps inoculate against this somewhat, because you go through the exercise of trying to find counter evidence at the same time, so that you’re essentially feeding your own brain conflicting messages. But that takes effort unless you’re already in the habit.
Something to keep in mind, regardless of how correct you think your habitual info channels are. If dissent is stamped out, like it is on many subreddits and Twitter, that’s a pretty bad sign.
That's a good point - we have to be confronted with opinions we don't agree with such that we maintain our mental muscles for reasoning about why some ideas are wrong/bad. Otherwise if we're only fed a stream of things we agree with, that can be used to smuggle in bad/wrong ideas without our knowing it or having much ability to confront it. Not to mention that every once in a while you're confronted with some challenging ideas that compel a change in worldview in a positive way!
> So what it really does is regurgitate an old, stale, pattern. In some sense, it prevents you from finding new experiences, keeping society frozen in time, repeating the behavior sequences of those before them, the pioneers and trailblazers that define the relationships early.
That would be true if the catalog of material to watch/listen/read remained static. But it does not. Nobody 10 years ago who was into music theory/practice would have seen Rick Beato's videos, or 12 Tone's. And things are different because those channels exist (and will presumably be different in another N years because of a different set of people producing new material).
The article is about more than youtube. The algorithms that balance the stock market, everyones 401ks, that predict repeat offenders in the criminal system. Stability, the kind that these systems attempt to create, is an equilibrium of unchanging nothingness. Change by definition is unstable.
While billions might watch a video on YouTube, it's not truly a shared experience unless it happens at the same time. And at least for me, even with live chat scrolling in the speed of light to the side, it still doesn't feel the same as "Live TV" did. But as I commented elsewhere in the discussion, I still prefer the current experience.
I understand where you are coming from but something about it doesn't seem quite right. I remember watching footage of 9/11 on the news while the event was happening. A Gen Z-er watching the same footage on YouTube could be said to have shared the same experience under your stance, but I feel like most people would disagree. I picked a significant world event as my example, but I could also see this applied to culturally relevant memes from the past.
I think live news events aren't a great example for this sort of thing. The experience of watching 9/11 live was that we didn't know what the hell was going on or what the aftermath would look like (a big terrorist in America was sort of unthinkable, after all). Knowing what the outcomes would be totally changes the experience.
A big terrorist attack wasn't particularly unthinkable. The WTC had been attacked before. We had the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people. There were the 1998 Embassy bombings in Africa and Clinton's 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan because of Al Qaida ties (and lots of comparisons to "Wag the Dog" due to the Lewinsky scandal, it was all over the news).
The fact that the WTC just wasn't there any more and someone had ran a plane into the Pentagon was the actual definition of shocking (as opposed to the Millennial definition of shocking which gets used for everything down to stubbing your toe on the coffee table). It wasn't all that surprising that we'd been attacked though and it was pretty obvious who did it, in real time. It was also obvious that we'd dive into bloodthirsty wars in the Middle East, and plenty of us protested the 2003 Iraq War on the streets, to no effect. The country wasn't really all that "unified". A bunch of people in the middle who didn't pay any attention to events did suddenly have one rammed into their face and they all jumped in the same direction and mindlessly rallied behind the flag in a way that led to disastrous wars in the Middle East. That isn't something to look back on with fond remembrance. We were predictably fucking idiots and ignored the people who bothered to point out the hazards of our actions. Stop being nostalgic about that.
Not only had the WTC previously been bombed, it was the same group who did it! Their goal to destroy that particular symbol of American commerce wasn't exactly secret.
The success of the plan is what's shocking. The visual symbol had a jarring effect that allowed the narrative of unity to prevail temporarily. The parallels to Pearl Harbor are deep.
For a more cultural example, I don't think today's teenagers would captivated by watching the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show in the same way as those who did back when it aired. Not just because they have already heard the songs, but because what it means to listen to music as an adolescent has changed so much. Watching people perform rock music on television isn't special, and songs about wanting to kiss and hold hands aren't considered risqué.
Not to offend, but there are plenty of these sorts of live cultural experiences for Gen Z that maybe you aren’t aware of and captivate millions of young audiences. Kissing and holding hands in the 60s seems like an artifact of a decade of undoing centuries of Christian religious repression in the west. You’re right that rock and roll is not novel anymore. Things change.
Twitch live streamers share experiences with tens or hundreds of thousands of folks. For example, I can guarantee any millions of young kids who played Fortnite learned about the musician Travis Scott through that.
Perhaps the era of mass media where 10-50+ million all tuned in at once is over, but there’s plenty of music and media that captivates many millions for live events.
Not knowing what is going to happen is exactly the thing. When people watched the moon landing, or a shuttle launch, they shared the anticipation, tension and hope. Anything could go wrong at any time, and sometimes it did. Watching something that is happening right now feels like it has more weight to it.
Watching something like this after the fact you most likely already know what's going to happen and it will not have the same emotional impact. Plus, whatever the outcome is, it's in the past.
Someone brought 9/11 as an example and that's definitely a good one. You can watch the videos online and feel grief, anger, sorrow. But you already know it happened. You will never watch this footage thinking this can't be real, this isn't happening. You will never have that sobering experience after the fact since you now live in a reality where it already occurred.
But did Baby Shark examine how America views war and its effects on the people who were not just in combat but trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction it produced? MASH was one of the first prime time TV shows that made people think about the cost of war and its ramification to society.
As someone who has no kids, I haven't seen Baby Shark, so maybe it does that too.
Your comment made me laugh, but seriously, Baby Shark succeeded because of the platform it was on, and how little kids today are virtually glued to that platform. I wouldn't really compare the two, let alone Baby Shark has almost nothing to do with a live shared experience, but also it's just a different product altogether. It's like comparing MASH to Coca Cola, sure more people will be able to recall Coca Cola over MASH, but that doesn't really say anything I suppose.
The cultural worth of mash is immaterial to whether or not it has comparable reach to baby shark (i.e. whether or not baby shark is a “shared experience”).
It does raise the question of whether or not the shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos that make up our "shared experiences" today are comparable to the shared experiences of the past which typically conveyed more depth, information, and meaning.
Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online - it would be disingenuous to write off the entirety of modern popular culture as "shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos." What we lack isn't depth, information and meaning but the power of a unified pop-cultural zeitgeist created by having cultural expression gatekept and controlled by a few broadcasters and media conglomerates.
If you want to know examine how America views war and its effects on the people who were not just in combat but trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction it produced, you have options beyond the blind, scheduled consumption of a single sitcom, however well written.
I do have to wonder how much of that is due to fake accounts.
I was looking over Wikipedia's lists of most watched youtube videos and wondered the same thing there. Lots of them are music videos and I'm sure recording companies are inflating the views to some extent, especially early in.
Fake accounts or no, its hard to find opinions among even smaller bloggers who don't at least tacitly kowtow whatever is debated among the major players in media at the time. You see it even on HN too, with certain regular 'major' storylines finding their way into the frontpage time and time again. We are only ever exposed to a limited set of opinions that fall within a range considered acceptable, given the incentive structures of media.
> Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online
this is true, but none of those are getting tens of billions of views. What spreads the farthest and the fastest are memes and quick hits of dopamine and rage. Those are what comprise our most shared experiences today. I think we'd agree that it's better to not be limited to only those things that have been curated for us by broadcasters and media conglomerates, but between our natural tendency to seek and spread low effort content and the curation of algorithmic gatekeepers optimizing to exploit that tendency our most seen and shared media typically ends up being far more shallow than it used to be.
A few generations ago the most 'viewed video' was mankind's first steps on the moon, an incredible feat of science and engineering that ignited their imaginations. Today ours is Baby Shark.
Comparing numbers between television in the 1960s and modern internet multimedia and then extrapolating that to a comparison of relative cultural impact is disingenuous. Baby Shark is only as viewed as it is because it's an easy way for people to distract their kids.
I don't agree that shared media experiences typically carried more depth and meaning pre-internet than today. You're picking out exceptions to the norm, but the mainstream is always mediocre. Most people weren't watching intellectually stimulating, complex, thought provoking works of art or listening to symphonies - people who watched television were literally referred to as "couch potatoes."
And if there were an event comparable to the Moon landing in cultural import (the closest I can think of in modern memory is COVID) it would of course be all over the internet, rather than localized on a single platform, to be compared to viewing on a single television channel.
> It does raise the question of whether or not the shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos that make up our "shared experiences" today are comparable to the shared experiences of the past which typically conveyed more depth, information, and meaning.
I don't really think they are comparable in any meaningful way. To bring any comparison we would try to make a little more towards apples-to-apples, let's just consider the subject of war. On one side, let's take the entirety of the MASH run, 250-odd episodes, and on take a handful of 2 minute compilations from the war in Ukraine. IMO more depth, info and meaning about war is more easily accessible from the meme-videos; It's impossible not to be viscerally affected when you watch a grenade drop a couple hundred feet onto some poor bastard below. MASH have may moments like "Keep that damn chicken quiet!" but it just isn't the same, nor as true.
Out of curiosity, when you wonder about "comparability" in this context, what metrics of qualities are you thinking about including in the comparison?
Yeah, bubble called having children. There is not a single child in my daughter class that do not know this song by heart. And I'm sure that it's not like they learned it by randomly surfing web on their own - their parents introduced it to them. It's really bad song but still its good that it provides some shared context for each and every one of them.
The YouTube algorithm won’t take long to serve it up if a viewer spends any amount of time watching programming for small children. It takes some time training the account that you don’t want anything related to baby shark to ever be suggested.
Knowing that perhaps our best example of "unifying culture", something that has been watched an incredible 11 billion times, is a cartoon song where 80+ percent of the words are "doo" repeated over and over...
It's still more unique than anything before as long as the number of buckets is larger than the number of available TV channels was a few decades ago or the number of available newspapers was a century ago.
Also, one point is that those algorithms operate on global scale. Even if there are a million other people who are in the same bucket as you are, they mostly don't live in your close proximity and you might never meet any of them in person. It's no wonder we feel isolated and lonely.
Are there "11 billion" views just like there are "about n million results" on the Google search page? I wonder how real that number is.
Anyway, that is a sidetrack; I agree with the rest of your point. Seeing the garbage that recommendation algorithms serve me is proof enough that they are not successfully crafting a unique experience just for me but instead putting me in some heap based on what they mistakenly think they know about me.
I call them propaganda streams, I share a similar bucket with my friend and it's interesting discussion the subtle tangents it takes us on - some days it will try get you mad about some world event, then some it will decide action sports is the go. I wonder how many other people are in the same streams watching the same suggested content thinking the same thoughts given to us, unlikely to ever go outside long enough to meet.
And speaking of shared experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w has been watched 11 billion times.
However, I suspect 10 billion of those may be my kids ...