I want to train it to give me communist content, news, culture discussion from the leftist perspective, ect…basically this site. Never used it before so I’m asking before I do anything on it so I don’t mess it up with the initial searches or anything.
Never passively scroll. It will just feed you thirst-trap and drama content and will hole you. You have to feed it very specific content or look up whatever hashtags kids are using these days for things. And even then, DO NOT PASSIVELY SCROLL as the algorithm will always try to feed you back into more mainstream or rage-bait content. If you keep liking communist content, it will feed you right-wing content as well with the hope that you will comment on it, thus increasing your 'engagement'.
These are highly unregulated and highly sophisticated social engagement tools (TikTok especially is the closest thing I have ever observed or experienced to digital content crack, where I have lost three hours and remember literally nothing that I watched) and they will outsmart you if you are not constantly thinking two or three meta-levels deep, because I assure you the creators are. Programmers are mostly fixing bugs, but the makers of these engagement algorithms have studied all the classic reality show tricks and are very good at fucking with your insecurities and psychology.
Damn, I thought I was doing it wrong when I kept getting Carlson stuff in the feed after searching Xi Jinping Thought.
That’s wild tbh.
This is kind of shit that doesn't get talked about and what is actually the problem with these sites, they are absolute masters of psychological manipulation with the only premise being 'engagement' and it's aimed directly at kids.
I mean, it's been this way on the internet forever, TikTok isn't pioneering anything new here, but they are far more aggressive about it than any other site I've seen since Vine and they basically took Vine's format and perfected the engagement algorithms and it's GUI.
You can tell that that is the focus because it is absolute hell to try to look up specific TikTok videos, even worse than modern YouTube. It is about fire and forget consumption.
That’s a good point, well two good points, but I’m starting to see what you mean. During the initial session I found a parenti clip with the top half being a familiar yellow and the bottom half was gameplay from a Minecraft obstacle course. It fucking glued my eyes for 2 loops before my brain turned back on and swiped for another.
It’s honestly scary imagining stuff like that but it’s Carlson and gameplay being algorithmically shoved at kids.
Most of the younger people I know watch all their videos on 1.25x speed but then can't explain jack shit outside of the basics of what they watched. They are incredibly good at consuming content, but in general, absolutely shit about thinking about it at a meta level (why am I being shown this?) or even evaluating it higher than that (what kind of world view is this media building?).
I'm not sure what that means for the future, but it's weird to know people who spend all their time on the internet but don't know what a forum is outside of reddit.
My cousin is a middle school teacher, she has talked about how her main priority is raising reading levels because that’s an issue now apparently. She works at a fancy private school and even the future fail sons of the rich are below age level for this.
Damn, I miss those super old school forums so much. Small Reddit style offshoots like this are cool too, but there’s just something about the format that led old school forums to have different vibes.
Oh yeah, I am absolutely convinced that most of my 19-year old coworkers (factory worker) are basically illiterate. Not functionally illiterate (although some of them are pretty close) but if you asked them to read and interpret something marginally complex it would just go in one ear and out the other. I also have a friend who is a high school teacher who despairs that her senior year students don't know what the difference between a primary or secondary source is. Basically zero media literacy. Based off of that, I have to imagine there is a literacy crisis in the U.S. that is being ignored simply because nobody is widely testing for it.
I miss not having likes or dislikes on forums, tbh.
That is honestly terrifying. With all the hate bait being peddled currently, the idea that a lot of young men are just going to passively take in the narrative can’t end well.
I agree, having to actually engage in order to express like/dislike seems like it fosters an environment of putting more effort in. Not having downvotes, but still getting to upvote stuff is a nice middle ground though. Reminds me of death stranding.
Occasionally I find myself getting pulled into Youtube shorts, and I struggle not to despair at the amount of traction that regurgitated misogynistic content I see being pushed gets. Literally just channel after channel dedicated to posting all the same terrible, stupid, arguments I remember seeing back on Youtube in 2008 but it says 'posted two weeks ago'. It really feels like time is just caught in a flat, rapidly accelerating, circle.
Again, idk where it leads, but imo 'china having access to our data' should be the last question that anybody in power is asking. Though, knowing our government, they will just be use it to try to target people for the military.
I’ll never understand what a normal person has to fear from a foreign government reading their emails or something. Only ghouls and the ghoul adjacent have any info they’d actually want. Of course none them actually care when I point the many ways our government has been caught doing mass surveillance and worse.
I realized after using it for the first time that infinite scrolling is the creation of fucking Yakub. With Reddit or this site, the algorithm will put a certain number of posts on the front page every day and they will be relatively stable - at least for me, if I get to the bottom of the first page it feels like a good time to go do something else, and if I check in again later in the day 90% of the posts will be the same, limiting how long I spend here. Tiktok's algorithm on the other hand has so much content (a result of most of it being pretty low-effort) that it never has to show you the same post twice, and the infinite scroll never gives you a natural break in the action where you can tap out.
Anyway, China has the right idea with limiting kids to 3 hours of gaming during the week, but they don't go far enough. Limiting everyone's social media access should be seen as a common sense public mental health measure.
I deleted tiktok one day when I realized i'd been on it for 16 hours. It does not go well with unemployment, depression, and ADHD.
Exactly, it absolutely wants to doom-hole you and if you're not extremely careful and conscious about your consumption, it will. But the entire thing is set up to lull you into a state of unconscious scrolling so you have to actively fight with the app itself to engage with it in a conscious way, and I am a fully grown adult who is incredibly aware of what it is doing, I can't even begin to imagine how it affects kids, who, in my experience, aren't thinking about things with that level of manipulation. Maybe some of the more savvy ones are, but certainly not the majority.