I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.

I haven't watched the news in 5 years. I started watching it again since Bondi (I live nearby), and while I'm surprised at the variation in reporting styles (political bias?) between Australian channels, my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.

I've found it very helpful to watch the live briefings, Q&As, etc with politicians, but the news cycle here is so short (hourly) that a few minutes later you get to hear a "recap" by the news reporter that glosses over most of the important and interesting points (at best) or actively removes key nuance and outright changes the message delivered by the original person (at worst).

I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.

Presumably this was what "journalism" was originally supposed to be.

Even when I was younger, I was baffled by how people could get their news just from TV, because the amount of information in a TV news report was so tiny compared to what you'd get in a newspaper. When I hear that people view TikTok as their main news source, it's like telling me people wear watermelons as socks. It's so nuts its hard for me to even bring the concept into my brain.

Amusing ourselves to death was such an eye opener for me when I was 19. After that I never took the news seriously.

I'm curious, is there some meaningful way for geriatric millennials to use Tik Tok?

Without being sucked in into doomscrolling and content consumption? Produce content? I'd guess it should be possible to play with the thing somehow...

We are destroying ourselves; the very core of what it is to be human. I say this acknowledging the irony of writing this on my phone, on a Sunday morning, when I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.

Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.

Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.

Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!

We’ve started instituting a “no phones” policy when the kids have sleepovers to try to combat this at least a little bit, and have constant conversations about why things like Instagram are toxic and we should just try to spend our time enjoying life.

Obviously I’m also posting here while I wait in the car waiting to pick someone up, but I actively make an effort to unplug on a regular basis.

Maybe what I need is an AI agent to consume AI generated content on my behalf.

Then I can continue with my strong preference to direct my time and attention toward content generated, mostly, by my fellow humans.

> is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.

Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.

Meta has already introduced a dedicated app for exactly this: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/meta-launches-vibes-a-shor...

I think in 12 months we're not going to know the difference unless we put in some serious effort. I use AI quite a lot and it's great, but don't like it for 'media' in general. Personally, I don't want to support AI generated audio, video, or text content. This past week I came across an Instagram account, found it interesting and followed it. Admittedly it was some high-level cookie cutter self-help stuff. Easy to catch your attention. Eventually I dug into it a bit more and it was 100% AI generated. I'd missed it completely and there were no comments suggesting it was AI content either despite over 1m followers. If you want to be sure the media you are viewing is actually created by real people, algorithmic feeds are no longer an option. It will be interesting to see over the next year or two whether there is a large backlash and people start seeking out content they are positive is created by real people, or if that becomes a subculture and the masses are happy with their circus.

Yes.

> Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume?

The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.

Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.

By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.

AI achieves many things for these platforms:

1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)

2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)

3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers

4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections

LLMs are a new phase of this. This time, I think it will truly kill the open web and reroute all traffic to two or three websites.

You can: you can mention Slack and Discord. :( :( :(

signed, another dinosaur (with a flawless "inbox 0" track record at both work and home, for decades now)

I think federation is interesting as a concept, but my time with Mastodon has revealed that even decentralized networks are just as full of outrage-centric entertainment and ragebait as the main networks.

I think “the algorithm” gets a lot of blame for mirroring the choices that people are making for themselves. Even when you remove any semblance of an algorithm people have no problem creating their own little worlds of outrage entertainment and rage bait.

Yeah, I think the article conflated a few points: I think the issue the author was having was that he thought that decentralized social networks were meant to be decentralized communication platforms, when they were meant to be decentralized content delivery platforms.

The problem isn't the decentralization, it's the choice of a goal. However, email, IRC, Matrix, etc all already exist, and are what the author wants, so I do see tbe article as a bit misguided.

I think what the author meant to say was "I thought ActivityPub was meant to be more like Matrix, but it's not, and I'm sad about that".

I don't think the article disagrees here? The issue is not control or decentralization, but consumption v. back and forth (communication).

You seem to be agreeing with the article?

>Having decentralized entertainment platforms

How? I don't even think decentralized is the appropriate term. They're distributed entertainment platforms in that they're protocol based, but regarding the distribution of content there's nothing in it that decentralizes reach. The social graph of Twitter and Mastodon could in principle be identical.

Malicious actors don't need to control algorithms. States running influence campaigns on say, Youtube or Facebook don't actually control any algorithm, they adapt their content to what does well on the platform. And they could equally do this, one could argue even more effectively, on the fediverse.

Saying the Fediverse solves top down influence is like thinking that Bitcoin solves wealth inequality. The distribution of the network is completely agnostic to the centralization of the content.

Facebook sometimes decides to block your account when the name is not 100% identical to your official ID.

Google when you make a chargeback or your youtuba channel has the song of a bird

The other platform also have similar weird cases.

I don't want to be instabanned from ALl the internet just because one site decides I did something wrong for real or imaginary reasons.

The app is not showing posts that don't contain a picture, but shows posts that do. So if you browse someone Mastodon account on Pixelfed, you will see just fraction of their posts.

https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html

I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway; but it shows that doing decentralised software is hard, because each actor can just do whatever they want.

Not really.

The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you.

The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.

> This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.

I'm curious if this message is new to many here?

What makes it feel "dramatic"? I get the impression people say something is "dramatic" when it doesn't really land or connect? Because when something punches me in the gut, I don't say "that was dramatic", I say "that was compelling".

I'm over 40, and these kinds of concerns (technology serving people's deeper needs rather than serving them up fleeting entertainment) has been on my radar for 15+ years. Back then, I was expecting to go into public administration, policy analysis, or "technology for good" to use what might be a naive phrase.

What is lost is social networking. Texting or calling people you already know isn't networking.

Every social network experiences convergent evolutionary pressure driving it to become social media instead.

Everything is being lost. We're in the process of sacrificing our collective humanity for corporate profit.

> Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.

The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.

Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.

Strong agree. I switched back to RSS after trying social media. Much more boring. And that has been a very good thing. It's also been much more substantive. It's like eating your veggies vs eating sugar candy.

Why should we believe that "being entertained" is a valuable thing? I suppose it serves an evolutionary purpose as "steering focus", e.g. noticing the unusual/novel/scary/etc. But, it's not the end goal. And overloaded attention mechanisms sounds like an obvious misfeature.

What Gemini are you and the author referring to? I presume not the LLM Gemini by Google?

Ah the Gemini protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

The email client might not show attachments, but will still let you know there is a message. Pixelfed is not letting the user know there is even a message.

Also you seem to be responding to the original post or just the first paragraph of this post. He understands the differences and the way he sees the differences is the whole post.

My thoughts definitely drifted there. I read it last year and IMO it’s still as relevant as ever.

Ma Bell was never profitable without government cheese. And her offspring can’t do much but complain about how every one else is making huge margins over “their” infrastructure.

Telecom is very very broken.

> Communication networks are not profitable.

This is strong and non-obvious claim; it warrants explanation, evidence, debate.

Because my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to, not a nagging number that sits there being more than zero.

And when I do pay attention to it, I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through the 180 emails that I've been cc'd on. It's literally not worth my time or dilution of my attention. When I have attempted to get on top of this by doing all the curation and rule-authoring that productivity mavens shout about, it works for a little while but entropy sets in.

I'm just not into scripting my own life and maximizing my productivity, and my job does not pivot on prompt email responses. So my email is a garbage dump with tire fires in it, and I know that, and I get on with the things I know are actually important.

I'm not recommending this! It's just the compromise that I have settled in to. But if you wonder "why would anyone," this is it.

I'm with you. I've had a mostly empty email for at least a decade (< 10 items, with each of them representing an action I'll need to take) and can't imagine doing it differently. I'm one of those empty desk/empty mind people, I guess.

> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.

An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.

You have only one inbox?

I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back.

At some point I realized those people were just like that.

I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.

We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.

I think I somewhat agree with the author but I find the idea of a single account completely unappealing. My view on the benefits of federation is that you don't have a single entity gating your access. Having multiple accounts is a benefit.

It's kinda weird.

Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.

On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.

I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!

We lost civilization to advertising IMO. It feels like the majority of all technology is built around monetizing clicks. Astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix.

Bloggers don't always publish immediately after writing a post, the start of the prior post explains the time line and the delay: https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html