Does that say ‘Predictive Algorithms’?
Yes it does. You see, when you are an old internet hand like myself, you’ve seen a few generations of how material is fed to you. Traditionally, forums, bulletin board systems, usenet, even LiveJournal would feed you data in a very organized fashion… by date and time. You stopped reading at 6pm last night, so now you can go look and read everything up until that point… and then you’re done. Do that once or twice a day and you have a source of balanced internet…
Then someone had the great idea that if you show people things out of order – they don’t know when to stop reading…. and it worked. Hell, if you throw in the occasional thing they have already seen, you can get them to stay even longer because that means you can feed them more advertising. Then, someone thought, what if we shorten the amount of content so they can absorb EVEN MORE! So now long form posts turned into Tweets. Youtube videos turned into Vines. Vines turned into Tiktoks. I, personally, find no joy in them, but if someone shows me something very funny.. I can even get caught in scrolling through 10 or 20 before I realize I am not enjoying it.
The sad thing is, you can’t put this genie back in the bottle. Video sites predict which videos you want to see, and knows the right time to show you a video you saw already and liked so you watch it again. News sites show you the information that you interact with, using the old Howard Stern truism ‘The people that like him listen an hour, the people that hate him listen for two’ — so it feeds you opposition to enhance your engagement.
What’s your point, Hatton?
Would you believe it’s simply that this is a perfect place to bitch about how the modern internet is built on giant companies feeding you unending redundant oppositional information in an attempt to keep you angrily watching advertisements and it makes me nostalgic for days where I could just see what’s happened since 6pm last night? And that this whole thing was spawned off the fact that Youtube won’t allow me to NOT watch ‘Shorts’ which are just another variety of staccato 30 second lipsync videos and it’s driving me nuts?
That’s my point. I’m old and grumpy and miss the old wild west internet…. and if you do too, please sign our guest book below and join the Something Podcast Webring brought to you by Angelfire.
