>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveye

Much of it is merely factual statements conveyed by over-the-top body language and vocal intonation which paint a clear "this is bad" or "this is good" language. Often the language is biased as well, but the modern newscasters are "telling you how to feel" via the tone of voice in the same way that a friend is "telling you how to feel" when he recounts his horrible day that the office. Via body language and tone of voice he prompts you to respond sympathetically to him, and the newscaster does much the same.

I have found that, often, there is only so much information to convey. They keep talking because that is their job, but you've already been told all there is to know. The rest is speculation, rumor, and prattle.

That's especially true for evolving emergencies like Bondi. In my opinion, you might as well wait until tomorrow, or next week, and get all of the information at once. Unless, of course, you're involved, but that's extremely rare.

I watch news (and everything else) on YouTube at 2x speed to keep the information density high enough to be worthwhile. Once you get used to it, regular media becomes less tolerable because everyone is talking too slow.

>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.

This is the key. I think they (entertainers cosplaying as journalists) do it on purpose. For example, from time to time I do attempt to watch some "news" on TV with my partner.

A typical interaction may be: - TV - "..the president vetoed a bill to lower taxes...here is what this politician thinks: 'I think he only cares to gain support of the extremists he secretly supports', and here is what another politician thinks 'it was a bad bill'" - me to my partner - "did I miss it? have they said what the bill was about? What were the exact things that were questionable?" - her - "nope" - TV - "... The president says he will be submitting a similar bill minus the parts he disagreed with, and now a house burned down in..." - me - "WTF was that?"

I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.

Part of the challenge is unless you know what the "news reporter's" role is (are they just reporting what they see/have heard vs. analysis/opinion and what their relevant expertise is; I'd suggest good news providers have clear divides and provide this information (though with biases), those that don't likely have some agenda), you get a mix of voices/views without a clear understanding of the facts. A different challenge is constraints of the various content formats/audiences (which are really only obvious when the same journalist does the same story in different formats).

> I haven't watched the news in 5 years. ...my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.

They're more concerned in being the first than being accurate.

Unless the event is something definitive like "celebrity died", it's much better to just check what happened a few days later when there are some actual facts and not just rushed speculation masquerading as facts.

I'd pay a modest subscription for a service that would give me the news, but just delayed by 24-72 hours, after all the "BREAKING NEWS" crap is just "news".

I used that book as a background example in a presentation I did you faculty on how to integrate new open resources into their classes. One guy in the back laughed really hard at that screen and everyone looked at him like he was a lunatic.

And that's the story of how I made a work best friend.

Seriously though, if you haven't read amusing ourselves to death you need to.

This is why I love listening to Joe Rogan, it’s hard for someone to keep to their coached media narrative for three and a half hours. I’m generally suspicious of people who tell me I shouldn’t listen directly to the words of people they dislike.

> 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.

I have found that some Youtube channels and videos (non-comprehensive examples below (I have hundreds of subscribed channels), mostly not politics, but these things inform politics since politics is making decisions about other things) can fill this gap nicely. This is not a perfect choice, since journalism integrity and standards do not apply, but I find that this can be mitigated by watching a wide variety (for example, in the field of economics, I regularly watch creators who espouse everything from very free-market capitalism all the way to full on communism). There are likely other forms of new media that operate at this level of depth, but I haven't found htem.

https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWUaS5a50DI

https://www.youtube.com/@HowMoneyWorks

https://www.youtube.com/@DiamondNestEgg

https://www.youtube.com/@TLDRnews (and associated channels)

https://www.youtube.com/@BennJordan (recent good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo)

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

I love both books, but when you read Understanding Media you will see how blatantly Postman just restated McLuhan's basic thesis and pretended to tweak it to make it his own ("the medium is the metaphor" has the same meaning as "the medium is the message"). However, I found where Postman's book really excelled was in its presentation of the historical changes in literacy in the US. I knew we were a literate country once, but I didn't realize just how much we were.

Honestly, it boils down to capitalism / market pressure. Quality journalism is expensive, compared to the return in the form of the price people are willing to pay for that quality journalism. Clickbait is so profitable, it's like a powerful magnet pulling all news institutions, be they TV channels, newspapers, or whatever, towards that model.

LLMs can produce a literal terabyte of slop for cheaper than a month's wage for a journalist. I'm not hopeful.

The TV will have maybe 5 stories, each told in one way only.

The Internet (including TikTok) will have nearly unlimited stories, told in unlimited ways.

I remember very well when just a few powerful people were allowed to decide what the public would be allowed to know and not know. They could suppress huge stories and leave the public in the dark. For example Chernobyl. They still try that today in print media and television, but have become a pathetic laughing stock now that information is free.

Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.

Current news media is even more narrowly focused on the three hot news stories of the day with 24-hour repetitive commentary all funneled into the narrative of the day.

I think, at a minimum, a return to print or radio news is called for. They necessitate attentive consumption of information in a way that video just doesn't. I feel like they leave mental space open for critical thought. TikTok is the total opposite.

So if we try to walk up all the ladders of abstractions and get to the core where we cannot go yet another layer above, what we end up? Word of mouth basically?

My general view on TikTok is: why would I even remotely want to use something that's specifically designed to exploit me and manipulate me? The tiny shred of value I might experience (in the form of an occasional interesting video) is a side-effect of the service, and if they could get their value out of me and give me literally nothing at all, they would. This same perspective applies to all the centralized "social media" services out there today. None of them exist to make society better or improve the lives of anyone in any meaningful way (outside of enriching the executives and investors running them).

To be honest, it's pretty easy to surface useful content on TT. Its algorithm is far more responsive to, say, immediate skips and likes/follows than Ig or FB.

I have found it a lot easier to find a diversity of opinions from a more diverse group of folks there. Specifically, I have been really interested in what leftist/liberal bipoc folks think about current events, and it's very easy to get that content. And it's easy enough to flip quickly past hoteps and maga black men, who I don't usually care about hearing from. The disussions between say, black anarchists, pro-Harris DNC folks, and afropessimists have been very enlightening, personally.

Those aren't conversations I have been able to find on, say, Ig.

The main thing is that it pays a lot of attention to what you actually stop and watch, so if you let your attention wander you might end up watching folks rebuild industrial electric motors or paint warhammer minis.

Honestly, I think it's a lot less mind numbing than the last bits of broadcast TV or feature films folks have inflicted on me, regardless of folks enjoying their ability to hate on it.

Why? Just leave it be, and your life will be just as rich if not richer.

I hear a lot of people be incredibly critical of TikTok, while being active consumers of Facebook/Instagram/X/etc. I've found the content on TikTok to be much better curated to what I actually like, with just enough (i.e., very little!) other content sprinkled in occasionally.

I asked someone a similar question to you a year ago and they told me something like "just spend 15 minutes with it. Aggressively swipe past things you aren't enjoying, like the the things you like. Search for something you are interested in too and like anything you like there". My feed is currently entirely basketball coaching tips for kids, cooking & recipes, stand up comedy, basic DIY, fitness/running tips, local restaurant recommendations, and sports highlights.

We don't have TikTok here (India), but I find YouTube shorts pretty useful. My feed is a mix of Action Labs shorts, Omar Agamy news, ZTT PC stuff, psychology, videos about animals (pet, domestic, wild), etc. I don't know what your standard for meaningful is, but the shorts are at least as useful as long form videos to me, if not more.

An important bit of context is that I prefer to get detailed information through text, research, sometimes podcasts, but rarely ever videos. The shorts serve as one low effort way (among others) for me to surface new potentially interesting things, to follow up on to the degree I find useful or interesting.

Closed-source, very-limited-API platforms like Tik Tok do not actually let you "play with the thing". What I imagine you would be interested in is a client which, say, gets the text version of a large number of short videos, filters those texts based on criteria you have defined and meta-data from TikTok (time, number of views, some proxies for a 'quality' measure) and serves you up with the results in a textual form, or perhaps a page with titles/summaries and links to the text and the video.

I'm not sure that's worth it but I'm willing to be this is not possible to achieve.

There is no meaningful way to use it.

I can actually remember when the consensus on HN was that TikTok was a novel, fresh experience that reminded them of the "old web" and its spark of creativity.

Now the consensus seems to be that it's a Chinese mind-control tool and it represents everything the misanthropes here hate about modern culture, the web and the generations that participate in it.

It seems to be exactly the same generational impulse as our parents railing against the "boob tube" and "devil music" or (to quote RMS) "(c)rap music." Although they weren't entirely wrong they weren't nearly as correct as they insisted they were. I suspect the same is true about the current moral panic around social media, and TikTok in general. Yes there are legitimate concerns, but it isn't the ontological evil people make it out to be either. It isn't actually controlling people's minds. It isn't actually more addictive than heroin.

And to answer NiloCK without another comment, what's worse will be "TikTok but everything is AI generated by the platform itself." Say what you will about TikTok, at least a lot of it is still human expression.

For me the difference is exactly what the article is about. TikTok was the first to abandon even a pretense of being about communication and became all about content. Facebook and IG have went the same way and are barely better these days, but TikTok exemplifies the trend

Yep. I remember my dad quoting some major news anchor as saying, “My job isn’t to report the news; it’s to shape perception.” Or something like that. I started watching the news with that as my lens, and it seems to be an axiom of the entire industry. I never have managed to find a reliable way to filter the signal from the noise, other than watching / reading the direct sources (CSPAN or whatnot). No one has time for that.

News has never been about reporting absolute truth, there is just too much influence/power/money to be gained for manipulating public perception.

The fact that people believe in journalistic integrity shows how successful they are at brainwashing the public.

This site is showing me two speeches and some AI 'analysis'. The analysis is very shallow.

> When I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.

While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think you need to couple "offline interaction" with this criticism. As a neurodivergent person in more than one way I appreciate being able to interact with people that face similar challenges to me and understand me. The problem is that social media is increasingly designed to not facilitate that, but content distribution.

Maybe the very core of what it is to be human is to destroy ourselves.

> so much content, it can keep me continually engaged

I find the total opposite to be true. I desperately want more engaging content to feed the gooey goblin in my brain but the overwhelming majority doesn't cut it and this was before AI.

Almost every show I see on netflix, tiktok I glance at, or reddit post is absolute unflavored mash potatoes. Content for content's sake. Feed me more content like scavengers reign and less frankenstein remakes or super hero slop.

We need the Butlerian Jihad

Perhaps one could frame it as "The Self under Siege".

https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...

Social media is bad but this might be being slightly dramatic IMO

The original opiate for the people criticism was leveled against religion by Karl Marx:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people

I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed with a measure of a restraint. It needs to be clear we can be reasoned with.

So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.

It is in the distant future still (if we ever get there without apocalypse first) but I think the goal was set out to be, from the very first bits of digital data, is to completely transition ourselves to a digital world. Living it in parallel will make less sense if Earth conditions get worse, and even less in space or on a hostile planet. In a digital world possibilities become limitless, disabilities, distances, shortcomings of the mind eliminated. Once you can't see a difference, will it matter if something is "real"? Sure, it can also become a hell and inhumane much easier, but this doesn't make it a less compelling dimension.

Looking through this lens, fighting, limiting internet usage is akin to moving to the rainforest to avoid capitalism - lone rebelling acts in the wrong direction of history, a temporary, partial victory for the few who dare this hassle.

Time is better spent to make this emerging space better, for everyone.

That sounds like work.

It has been well theorized by A. Dugin : Wére now in the era of full realization / triumph of postmodernity. After having crushed all its 20th-century adversaries, western liberalism and its ideology of universal 'progress' will destroy everything that makes us truly human

HN is my guilty pleasure as well.

isn't HN more like professional news/discussion place?

is it considered social media?

Maybe. I am saying this not to be contrarian, but I am seeing a rather specific pattern in some areas. Chatgpt used to be pretty decent in cross thread musings, but those got capped hard to the point that even wide recall invocation does not always work as intended. And that change wasn't just about resources. Similar stuff seems to be happening with various lawsuits on the 'creative' side.

All this makes me thing that while the capability may be there for those who want it, openly accessible stuff will be heavily nerfed. You know, just like now.

You jest, but I would it if my AI agent suggested, "How about a book to read? Stay off the internet for a week—I picked up a used book on eBay for you that I think you'll enjoy. Don't worry, I paid for it by doing a little trading on the side."

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

I use an AI powered tool to "listen" to podcasts and remove ads from them before I listen to the podcast myself.

[dead]

Which users? I typically dislike TikTok and other shorts but the platforms seem to be wildly popular even despite my opinions.

They don't have to like it they just need to engage with it.

They only dislike it when they can tell it’s AI, but that’s becoming less and less of a possibility.

>> The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising.

This just isn't true. There was a time when we had a chronological feed, only containing content from friends and family, and no advertising. The business model end goal was always advertising but social media doesn't necessarily need to be for that purpose (e.g. the fediverse).

Well, I'd be careful about the "always", when Facebook and Twitter started out they understood virality but they did not understand monetization -- early on the likes of Zynga and King were making money off Facebook and it wasn't until Facebook was forced to go public and Sheryl Sandberg was running things that they figured out that they could capture the free publicity brands got on Facebook and sell it back to them.

I don't see how this will kill the web.

If anything, it might make it easier to find more of the older nerdier web that wasn't made for profit.

Also, there are so many people that are already so rabidly anti-AI that I'm certain they will form their own communities outside the mainstream.

And kill many apps, maybe even OSes.

When most of what a user can do can be done from one single UI, the low friction will win.

And since all the data must be sent to the service, and that a super intelligent AI analysis all this data, the spying that is already considered outrageous today will reach unprecedented level.

Now, associate that with the fact the last year people in charge of said systems kissed the ring of the power that be in the most disgusting way. Add what we learned about surveillance from 3 letters agency.

You get your dystopia. It's not an if now. It's a when.

We need to solve that problem now. Once we hit it, we will lose the ability to solve it.

And I'm not sure where you could go on earth to escape it.

I'm old enough to have been on the internet before social networks, back in the days of forums / bulletin boards. Even then there was always a new drama in the community. I feel it's human nature.

Each server on a federated platform has control over how content retrieved through ActivityPub is delivered to its users. A healthy federated network allows competitions between "algorithms" for the same content. The social graph can be identical, but how it's traversed differs.

Think about how platforms have algorithmic comment ranking now, where two users who open the same comment section can see different top comments. This is a corporation or state (think tiktok) directly influencing how someone sees what their community thinks.

I don't see the bitcoin comparison.

The more typical / appropriate word here would be "over-dramatic" or "melodramatic", not "dramatic".

It's more like Usenet users complaining that NZB downloaders don't let their users read text posts. Nobody using an NZB downloader gives a fuck about text posts. They're not there to chat with their fellow humans, they're there to download files. Both the text posts and binary files are transmitted by the same substrate, NNTP, but the protocol clearly has multiple groups of people using it for very different purposes.

Comparing it to email is inappropriate, because email is addressed to you, and you get upset if email servers/clients drop emails. But newsfeeds are not addressed to you. Neither is RSS/Atom. ActivityPub, generally speaking, isn't either. How you choose to experience messages coming your way is up to you. This whole article is making the assumption that if you want something more different, e.g. Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy (Fediverse Instagram/YouTube/Reddit), it basically must also be Mastodon/Pleroma (Fediverse Twitter). Why must it?

What is the image sharing platform's criteria for "entertaining enough"? Is it whether or not the message is an image?

Yes but the author lumps all decentralized and/or social networks together when all he really means to talk about is ActivityPub specifically.

I mean, Gmail by default does silently hide spam from your inbox.

Meanwhile this is the normal, expected, and well-received behavior on ATproto. Every platform defines its own lexicon and can optionally support others. It wouldn't make sense for a blogging platform like (for example) Leaflet to show Bluesky posts the same way it shows blog posts. And apps can be selective too: Skylight only shows video posts. It's exactly how it should be for a video app.

The "account" then is just the data on your PDS with as many views into it as someone wants to develop. If I'm browsing (viewing) an account (subset of data) through a platform or app devoted to one type of content (data), I only want to see that kind of content in the main timeline. I can always pull out something like ATExplore or PDSls if I want to see everything.

The complaint only makes sense for a protocol that expects you to make a new account for a new platform and has limited portability. It doesn't make sense when an "account" is just a view into data, no more morally compromised than an SQL query. I'm skeptical the movement to revive the dead half of ActivityPub that could enable similar functionality will go anywhere, but I am rooting for the folks behind it.

> nobody really uses Mastodon anyway

760 000 active users [1] beg to differ

[1]: https://mastodon-analytics.com/

> I don't think it's important at all because nobody really uses Mastodon anyway;

Me and all the (real human) people I follow on Mastodon disagree. Many well known people are on Mastodon. A lot of folks I used to follow on RSS are on Mastodon. For me, Mastodon is what killed RSS.[1]

[1] RSS was well and alive long after Google Reader shut down.

I'm floored!

My experience pre-Uber was that cabs were never there when you need them, the cars were smelly and in bad shape, the rides were expensive, seatbelts were usually broken, and drivers were not particularly motivated to be civil, never mind kind.

I personally don't drink bottled water on principle, but in theory it's nice to know it's there if I'm suffering.

Are your local cabs just amazing? I'm open to it, but again... floored. This very well could be a regional difference.

Edit: I cannot believe that I forgot to mention that the entire taxi medallion system found in most cities was not only deeply corrupt and usually intimately connected with organized crime... but the ownership structure was such that they enabled some of the worst legal wage slavery rackets in the western world. You've had these deeply shady owners with dozens of medallions and fleets of easily replaced, mostly immigrant drivers who all seemed to be prepared to drive for decades before someday hopefully being able to buy their own car and then drive it until they die.

I dunno, man. Convince me I'm mistaken.

Obviously it depends on the quality of service where you live.

Group chats are social networking. You’ll meet people you didn’t already know.

Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.

But especially if you allow audio/video then your moderation costs can get very high if you're aiming for more "broadcast" and less "community."

The protocol is older than productized transformers. It's like that scene from Office Space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZKVKxZcAo

My head was preparing to spin if he had said he gets all of his news from google Gemini.

It's a depressing thought, but I bet we will see younger people in our lifetime that just get news exclusively from LLMs

>> On the other hand that's not enough for a business

It could be. Once Facebook had everyone on board they could have pivoted to a model where people pay directly. It's easy to forget how incredibly useful it was in the early years. It's not enough for a business that needs to endlessly grow but businesses don't NEED to do that - especially tech companies where costs can be incredibly low once the initial website is built.

Hear hear. Ban all advertising. We could do it slow.

Start by banning all gambling and drug commercials. That's like 20% of all commercials right there. This is already normal in other countries.

Then ban all billboards. People hate them already.

Then the big one, ban targeted advertising. With personalized ads gone, all of the incentives that make data collection profitable are gone.

Of course there will still be bad actors that want data mining to continue. But right now you can't even read 95% of websites because they have popups that make you agree to data mining just to get in. I'll be searching for like, a recipe and they want my name, device IP, browser fingerprint, and anything else they can pinch.

I'm searching for a nice spinach salad recipe. I go to google

First it fires up an LLM, which will run a GPU in an AI data center that they probably cleared a forest to build.

I just made nvdia stronger. I just helped pump their AI "adoption" numbers. And I helped train an AI that will help layoff me and my friends.

As always I run the search again with "-noai" at the end. Now I'm searching twice for no reason. The results were better, and faster 10 years ago.

It gives me results and I click the first link. A video that I can't pause starts auto playing. This recipe isn't that good so I go back and find another. I need to click the back button 4 times.

I try another link. And get another pop up. I opt into data mining this time because uBo is having trouble with the full page transparent overlays. Now they have my data to sell to 3rd party intermediaries that will sell them to companies like palantir and cambridge analytica. Every search builds a little more of my "shadow profile".

Maybe I should have just gone to the library and taken a picture. All I wanted was a salad recipe and I've now helped train the system that made brexit possible. I've helped nvdia. I've helped the very AI datacenters that I hate. I've helped the data miners.

The experience of using a computer in 2025 is exhausting. Particularly search engines. They used to work so good. They used to be so fast.

We need a Caesar who will ban all advertising. Lacking a Caesar, we could start with publicly funded NFL stadiums e.g. MetLife to get a foot in the door and go from there. Something must be done.

Docker for humans!

Thanks. So no fear of losing important stuff to the noise?

Also mind you, this is not about productivity. If you don't want to act on something, you delete it.

But what about the joy of deleting 112 messages from the trash folder every day?

Throughout history, real social conversations and movements have happened around thought leaders that dedicate their lives to painstakingly understanding and expressing a certain point of view on a set of issues. Be it in written form or through oratory, it then acts as an anchor to frame and facilitate conversations between people one-on-one.

Real progress requires that hard work of crafting and spreading a vision, something to point at that helps people express what they struggle to express themselves. It also then needs that protected intimacy of long conversations between individuals to digest it.

The architecture of social media centered around short-form public communication is not appropriate for this.

This of course applies to both constructive and destructive movements, but it’s the only way to get big real things done. I suppose that’s why we have this emergent class of powerful independent (podcast) intellectuals after a long time of the concept not being a thing. Again, for better or worse, plenty of both.

Social media is probably not the best place to make such communications anyway. It is good for propaganda but not good for serious discussion. Serious, scientific discussion asks for a lot more than just communication itself.

hmm ok, I thought it might be that, but then I would have expected "I did" to have been "I published"

Bluesky seems to be pre-Musk Twitter 2.0. Its content is basically the same (art + "look at the bad thing the Republicans are doing - the Democrats will solve this"). Its moderation policies are basically the same (post anything too different from what's there = ban. Centralised moderation). Its user base, although smaller, draws from roughly the same pool. And Jack Dorsey made it. And it even has a blue logo. It's clear he just wanted to create Twitter a second time and succeeded at that.

Facebook started as people communicating too.

I just don't understand why do you need to create a new incompatible protocol when ActivityPub exists - unless enshittification is in the roadmap. Even less I understand why prefer it over e.g. Mastodon from the user's perspective